# Fusion Anything: A Generalized Multimodal Foundation Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22107 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22107/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [Janus: Decoupling Visual Encoding for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13848/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Learning with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06488/) (2022)
- [Attention Bottlenecks for Multimodal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00135/) (2021)
- [Omnivore: A Single Model for Many Visual Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08377/) (2022)
- [MOSI: Multimodal Corpus of Sentiment Intensity and Subjectivity Analysis in Online Opinion Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06259/) (2016)
- [Towards Multimodal Sarcasm Detection (An _Obviously_ Perfect Paper)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01815/) (2019)
- [Trusted Multi-View Classification with Dynamic Evidential Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11423/) (2022)
- [A Patient-Centric Dataset of Images and Metadata for Identifying Melanomas Using Clinical Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07360/) (2020)
- [MultiBench: Multiscale Benchmarks for Multimodal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07502/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Token Fusion for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08721/) (2022)
- [UR-FUNNY: A Multimodal Language Dataset for Understanding Humor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06618/) (2019)
- [PAD-UFES-20: a skin lesion dataset composed of patient data and clinical images collected from smartphones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00478/) (2020)
- [Foundations and Trends in Multimodal Machine Learning: Principles, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03430/) (2022)
- [TabDPT: Scaling Tabular Foundation Models on Real Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18164/) (2024)
- [Quantifying & Modeling Multimodal Interactions: An Information Decomposition Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12247/) (2023)
- [Provable Dynamic Fusion for Low-Quality Multimodal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02050/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Making prediction with multimodal data is widely used in diverse scenarios. Existing multimodal fusion models, once deployed, can only handle predefined modalities (e.g., vision, text and audio) and single task, making it difficult to quickly adapt to new downstream applications. Therefore, a natural yet aggressive question arises - whether there exists a general multimodal fusion model that can be applied to arbitrary modality combinations and arbitrary prediction tasks. We argue that a unified multimodal fusion model should not depend on specific modalities and should instead encode transferable patterns of multimodal correlation. To this end, we propose a simple and effective learning paradigm based on training on large-scale synthetic multimodal datasets generated with Structural Multimodal Causal Models (SMCMs), which formally characterizes the generative processes of real-world multimodal data. Building on this framework, we propose the Fusion Anything Model (FAM), a foundation model for generalized multimodal data fusion. By constructing large-scale synthetic multimodal data with diverse correlation patterns, our model encodes transferable multimodal correlations during training and activates appropriate associations through in-context examples during inference. Extensive experiments on 18 real-world datasets spanning 12 modalities and 11 prediction tasks demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance with specialized models without task-specific adaptation.