Dealing with All-stage Missing Modality: Towards A Universal Model with Robust Reconstruction and Personalization

Abstract

Addressing missing modalities presents a critical challenge in multimodal learning. Current approaches focus on developing models that can handle modality-incomplete inputs during inference, assuming that the full set of modalities are available for all the data during training. This reliance on full-modality data for training limits the use of abundant modality-incomplete samples that are often encountered in practical settings. In this paper, we propose a robust universal model with modality reconstruction and model personalization, which can effectively tackle the missing modality at both training and testing stages. Our method leverages a multimodal masked autoencoder to reconstruct the missing modality and masked patches simultaneously, incorporating an innovative distribution approximation mechanism to fully utilize both modality-complete and modality-incomplete data. The reconstructed modalities then contributes to our designed data-model co-distillation scheme to guide the model learning in the presence of missing modalities. Moreover, we propose a CLIP-driven hyper-network to personalize partial model parameters, enabling the model to adapt to each distinct missing modality scenario. Our method has been extensively validated on two brain tumor segmentation benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of our method, which consistently exceeds previous state-of-the-art approaches under the all-stage missing modality settings with different missing ratios. Code will be available.