CoRiM: Conflict-driven Risk Minimization for Dynamic Multimodal Fusion

摘要

Dynamic multimodal fusion methods lack robust theoretical guidance for handling modal conflicts and inconsistent data quality. While recent theoretical work has associated modal weights with scalar quantities such as loss or confidence, this paradigm struggles to comprehensively address the risks caused by inconsistent predictive distributions across modalities. In this paper, we propose a **Co**nflict-driven **Ri**sk **M**inimization (**CoRiM**) dynamic fusion paradigm. Specifically, we redefine dynamic fusion as a principled, per-sample, direct risk minimization task. To this end, we first design a novel, differentiable Modality Conflict Risk (MCR) function, \mathcal R (w), which quantifies risk by directly modeling fused uncertainty and inter-modal consistency. Second, we identify that minimizing \mathcal R (w) is fundamentally a non-convex constrained optimization problem over the probabilistic simplex. To efficiently solve this specific challenge, we innovatively introduce the projection free Frank-Wolfe (FW) algorithm, as it is perfectly suited for optimization on the simplex.We prove that our designed \mathcal R (w) possesses L-smoothness, which provides theoretical guarantees for the convergence of the FW algorithm on our non-convex objective. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that CoRiM outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in high-conflict and noisy environments, validating the robustness of our method.