# Harnessing Shared Relations via Multimodal Mixup Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.17777 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17777/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [SLIP: Self-supervision meets Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12750/) (2021)
- [Supervision Exists Everywhere: A Data Efficient Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05208/) (2021)
- [Scaling Language-Image Pre-training via Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00794/) (2022)
- [On Mixup Training: Improved Calibration and Predictive Uncertainty for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11001/) (2019)
- [Pixel-BERT: Aligning Image Pixels with Text by Deep Multi-Modal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00849/) (2020)
- [Gated Multimodal Units for Information Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01992/) (2017)
- [Combined Scaling for Zero-shot Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10050/) (2021)
- [What Makes Multi-modal Learning Better than Single (Provably)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04538/) (2021)
- [Supervised Multimodal Bitransformers for Classifying Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02950/) (2019)
- [More Diverse Means Better: Multimodal Deep Learning Meets Remote Sensing Imagery Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05457/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Robust Multi-Omics Integration from Incomplete Modalities Significantly Improves Prediction of Alzheimer's Disease](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20842/) (2025)
- [Mixup Helps Understanding Multimodal Video Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10986/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep multimodal learning has shown remarkable success by leveraging contrastive learning to capture explicit one-to-one relations across modalities. However, real-world data often exhibits shared relations beyond simple pairwise associations. We propose M3CoL, a Multimodal Mixup Contrastive Learning approach to capture nuanced shared relations inherent in multimodal data. Our key contribution is a Mixup-based contrastive loss that learns robust representations by aligning mixed samples from one modality with their corresponding samples from other modalities thereby capturing shared relations between them. For multimodal classification tasks, we introduce a framework that integrates a fusion module with unimodal prediction modules for auxiliary supervision during training, complemented by our proposed Mixup-based contrastive loss. Through extensive experiments on diverse datasets (N24News, ROSMAP, BRCA, and Food-101), we demonstrate that M3CoL effectively captures shared multimodal relations and generalizes across domains. It outperforms state-of-the-art methods on N24News, ROSMAP, and BRCA, while achieving comparable performance on Food-101. Our work highlights the significance of learning shared relations for robust multimodal learning, opening up promising avenues for future research. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/RaghavSinghal10/M3CoL.