# Code and Pixels: Multi-Modal Contrastive Pre-training for Enhanced Tabular Data Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07304 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07304/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [TabNet: Attentive Interpretable Tabular Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07442/) (2019)
- [LayoutLMv3: Pre-training for Document AI with Unified Text and Image Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08387/) (2022)
- [Cross-stitch Networks for Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03539/) (2016)
- [TaBERT: Pretraining for Joint Understanding of Textual and Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08314/) (2020)
- [Context Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03026/) (2022)
- [PeCo: Perceptual Codebook for BERT Pre-training of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12710/) (2021)
- [Neural Oblivious Decision Ensembles for Deep Learning on Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06312/) (2019)
- [Multimodal Contrastive Learning with LIMoE: the Language-Image Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02770/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Real Talking Faces via Self-Supervision for Robust Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07131/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Contrastive Training for Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12836/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Generalisation with Meta Auxiliary Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08933/) (2019)
- [Best of Both Worlds: Multimodal Contrastive Learning with Tabular and Imaging Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14080/) (2023)
- [DocFormerv2: Local Features for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01733/) (2023)
- [ContIG: Self-supervised Multimodal Contrastive Learning for Medical Imaging with Genetics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13424/) (2021)
- [M5Product: Self-harmonized Contrastive Learning for E-commercial Multi-modal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04275/) (2021)
- [OLIVES Dataset: Ophthalmic Labels for Investigating Visual Eye Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11195/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Transformer for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01265/) (2022)
- [Multi-task Paired Masking with Alignment Modeling for Medical Vision-Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07920/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning from tabular data is of paramount importance, as it complements the conventional analysis of image and video data by providing a rich source of structured information that is often critical for comprehensive understanding and decision-making processes. We present Multi-task Contrastive Masked Tabular Modeling (MT-CMTM), a novel method aiming to enhance tabular models by leveraging the correlation between tabular data and corresponding images. MT-CMTM employs a dual strategy combining contrastive learning with masked tabular modeling, optimizing the synergy between these data modalities. Central to our approach is a 1D Convolutional Neural Network with residual connections and an attention mechanism (1D-ResNet-CBAM), designed to efficiently process tabular data without relying on images. This enables MT-CMTM to handle purely tabular data for downstream tasks, eliminating the need for potentially costly image acquisition and processing. We evaluated MT-CMTM on the DVM car dataset, which is uniquely suited for this particular scenario, and the newly developed HIPMP dataset, which connects membrane fabrication parameters with image data. Our MT-CMTM model outperforms the proposed tabular 1D-ResNet-CBAM, which is trained from scratch, achieving a relative 1.48% improvement in relative MSE on HIPMP and a 2.38% increase in absolute accuracy on DVM. These results demonstrate MT-CMTM's robustness and its potential to advance the field of multi-modal learning.