Synergistic Prompting for Robust Visual Recognition with Missing Modalities

Conference: ICCV 2025 arXiv: 2507.07802
Code: N/A
Area: Multimodal VLM / Missing Modality Learning / Prompt Learning Keywords: missing modality, dynamic prompt, synergistic prompting, CLIP, multi-modal learning

TL;DR

This paper proposes the Synergistic Prompting (SyP) framework, which employs a dynamic adapter to generate input-adaptive scaling factors that modulate a base prompt (dynamic prompt), synergizing with a static prompt that captures shared cross-modal features. SyP achieves robust visual recognition under missing-modality conditions and consistently outperforms SOTA methods such as DCP on MM-IMDb, Food101, and Hateful Memes.

Background & Motivation

Background: Multimodal learning has achieved notable progress in cross-modal retrieval, VQA, and related tasks, primarily leveraging large-scale paired datasets and pretrained multimodal Transformers (e.g., CLIP). In real-world deployments, however, sensor failures, privacy constraints, and data collection difficulties frequently result in incomplete modality inputs.

Taxonomy of Existing Approaches: - Joint learning: Models cross-modal correlations by aligning latent feature spaces, but relies on masking or imputation strategies that introduce noise. - Cross-modal generation: Attempts to reconstruct missing modalities from available ones, but modal heterogeneity leads to poor reconstruction quality and high computational overhead. - Prompt-based methods: Leverage learnable prompts to adapt pretrained models in a parameter-efficient manner, yet suffer from two fundamental limitations.

Two Core Limitations of Existing Prompt Methods: - (1) Static prompts lack flexibility: All inputs share identical prompt embeddings regardless of which modality is missing or the degree of missingness, making adaptation to dynamic real-world scenarios impossible. - (2) Lack of inter-layer synergy: Simple prompt tuning fails to adequately exploit multimodal dependencies encoded in hierarchical model representations, leading to unreliable performance when critical modalities are absent.

Key Challenge: A fundamental mismatch exists between the "one-size-fits-all" design of static prompts and the highly dynamic nature of modality-missing patterns in real-world scenarios. When a critical modality is absent, the model must adaptively amplify the contribution of available modalities—a capability that static approaches cannot provide.

Key Insight: The paper combines dynamic prompts (input-adaptive) with static prompts (preserving pretrained knowledge) into a "synergistic prompting" strategy that simultaneously ensures flexibility and stability.

Method

Overall Architecture

SyP is built upon CLIP's dual-stream architecture (image encoder + text encoder), freezing the backbone and updating only the prompts and FC layers. For each input, the modality-missing type \(m \in \{c, m_1, m_2\}\) (complete, missing image, missing text) determines a modality-specific synergistic prompt \(P_m^I\) (image branch) and \(P_m^T\) (text branch), which are prepended to the input token sequence.

Key Design 1: Dynamic Adapter

The dynamic adapter computes input-adaptive scaling factors based on the available modality features of the current input to dynamically modulate the strength of the base prompt.

Feature concatenation: Image features \(X_I \in \mathbb{R}^{d_I}\) and text features \(X_T \in \mathbb{R}^{d_T}\) are concatenated into a joint feature vector:

\[X_C = [X_I, X_T]\]

Scaling factor computation: A bottleneck MLP computes the scaling factor:

\[S_d = \sigma\left(\text{MLP}\left(\text{ReLU}\left(\frac{1}{r}W_1 X_C + b_1\right)\right)W_2 + b_2\right)\]

where \(r\) is the dimensionality reduction ratio and sigmoid constrains \(S_d \in [0,1]\). Larger \(S_d\) amplifies prompt influence; smaller \(S_d\) attenuates it, enabling adaptive modulation according to the relevance of each modality.

Dynamic prompt generation: The scaling factor is applied element-wise to the base prompt:

\[P_{I,D} = P_{I,B} \odot S_d, \quad P_{T,D} = P_{T,B} \odot S_d\]

When a modality is absent, the scaling factor increases the weight of the corresponding prompt; when modalities are complete, it reduces it, achieving adaptive modality-weight allocation.

Key Design 2: Synergistic Prompting Strategy

Static prompt: Captures shared features between image and text modalities, projected into each modality space via learned linear projection functions:

\[P_{I,S} = G_I(P_S), \quad P_{T,S} = G_T(P_S)\]

Final synergistic prompt: Dynamic and static prompts are summed element-wise:

\[P_m^I = P_{I,D} + P_{I,S}, \quad P_m^T = P_{T,D} + P_{T,S}\]

This combination ensures the model simultaneously exploits modality-specific adaptive adjustments (dynamic prompt) and shared cross-modal features (static prompt).

Key Design 3: Inter-Layer Prompt Propagation

Prompts are recursively propagated across Transformer layers; the prompt at layer \(i\) is derived from the preceding layer's prompt via a transformation function:

\[P_m^{I,R_i} = F_i(P_m^{I,R_{i-1}}) = \text{LN}(\text{FC}(\text{GeLU}(\text{FC}(P_m^{I,R_{i-1}}))))\]

This ensures that each layer's prompt integrates learned representations from the previous layer together with current-layer input features, capturing hierarchical multimodal representations.

Loss & Training

Standard task-specific loss functions are employed. The final multimodal prompt feature is obtained by concatenating image and text prompts followed by an FC layer:

\[P_{\text{final}}^{(i)} = \text{FC}(P_m^{I,R_{i-1}} \| P_m^{T,R_{i-1}})\]

The total training loss is the sum of per-sample task losses: \(\mathcal{L}_{\text{total}} = \sum_{i=1}^{N} \mathcal{L}_i(P_{\text{final}}^{(i)})\)

Key Experimental Results

Datasets & Setup

• MM-IMDb: 25,959 image-text movie samples, multi-label genre classification, F1-Macro.
• UPMC Food-101: 101 food categories with noisy image-text pairs, Top-1 Accuracy.
• Hateful Memes: 10,000+ hateful meme detection samples, AUROC.
• Backbone: CLIP ViT-B/16; prompt length \(L_p=36\); applied to \(M=6\) layers.
• AdamW, lr=1e-3, weight decay=2e-2, 20 epochs, batch size=32.

Main Results

Dataset	Missing Rate	Missing Modality	DCP	SyP (Ours)	Gain
MM-IMDb (F1)	50%	Both (balanced)	52.32	55.02	+2.70
MM-IMDb (F1)	70%	Both (balanced)	51.42	52.90	+1.48
MM-IMDb (F1)	90%	Both (balanced)	48.04	49.63	+1.59
Food101 (Acc)	50%	Both (balanced)	85.24	86.17	+0.93
Food101 (Acc)	70%	Both (balanced)	81.87	82.45	+0.58
Food101 (Acc)	90%	Both (balanced)	79.87	81.03	+1.16
Hateful Memes (AUROC)	50%	Both (balanced)	66.02	68.16	+2.14
Hateful Memes (AUROC)	70%	Both (balanced)	66.08	68.42	+2.34
Hateful Memes (AUROC)	90%	Both (balanced)	66.78	68.93	+2.15

SyP surpasses SOTA DCP across all datasets, missing rates, and missing patterns, with the most pronounced improvements on Hateful Memes (+2–7 percentage points).

Ablation Study

Variant	Hateful Memes	Food101	MM-IMDb
w/o Synergistic Prompts (classifier fine-tuning only)	57.35	71.59	44.63
Dynamic Prompt only	66.37	82.90	51.21
Static Prompt only	65.62	83.06	50.34
SyP (Dynamic + Static Synergy)	68.16	86.17	54.72

Variant	Hateful Memes	Food101	MM-IMDb
Base Prompt only	64.27	81.68	48.95
Base Prompt + Dynamic Adapter	66.37	82.90	51.21
Synergistic Prompts (w/o Dynamic Adapter)	66.19	84.85	51.90
Synergistic Prompts + Dynamic Adapter	68.16	86.17	54.72

Key Findings

1. The dynamic–static synergy outperforms either strategy alone by 3–4 percentage points, demonstrating that "synergy" is the critical factor.
2. The dynamic adapter contributes an additional ~2 percentage points on top of synergistic prompts, validating the effectiveness of adaptive scaling.
3. At high missing rates (90%), SyP exhibits substantially smaller performance degradation than baselines, demonstrating superior robustness.
4. Dataset-specific characteristics differ: MM-IMDb and Food101 rely more heavily on textual semantics (text missingness is more detrimental), while Hateful Memes is more sensitive to image missingness.

Highlights & Insights

1. The complementary dynamic–static design is elegant: Dynamic prompts handle adaptive adjustment (flexibility), while static prompts maintain the pretrained knowledge base (stability); their element-wise summation is simple yet effective.
2. The scaling factor design has clear intuition: When a modality is absent, its input is a zero tensor; the concatenated joint feature naturally skews toward the available modality, and the sigmoid MLP output adjusts the scaling factor accordingly—without any explicit missing-modality detection mechanism.
3. Parameter efficiency: The CLIP backbone is frozen; only prompts and FC layers are trained, introducing minimal additional parameters.

Limitations & Future Work

1. Validation is limited to \(M=2\) modality settings; extension to three or more modalities has not been explored.
2. Missing modalities are replaced by zero-filled tensors; more sophisticated imputation strategies remain unexplored.
3. Experiments are confined to classification tasks; generative tasks (captioning, VQA) are not addressed.
4. Sensitivity analysis of hyperparameters such as the dimensionality reduction ratio \(r\) of the dynamic adapter is insufficient.

Related Work & Insights

• Missing modality learning: Joint learning (SMIL, ShaSpec), cross-modal generation (LEL, MTP), prompt-based methods (MMP, DePT, DCP).
• Prompt Learning: CoOp, MaPLe, DePT, DCP, and related prompt tuning methods.
• Multimodal pretraining: CLIP, ViT, and related backbone architectures.

Rating

• Novelty: 3/5 (The dynamic–static prompt combination has moderate novelty, but the overall framework is relatively engineering-driven.)
• Technical Depth: 3/5 (The method is clean but lacks theoretical analysis.)
• Experimental Thoroughness: 4/5 (Three datasets, multiple missing rates, and comprehensive ablation studies.)
• Writing Quality: 3/5 (Generally clear but somewhat verbose.)

Related Papers

• [ICLR 2026] MoRA: Missing Modality Low-Rank Adaptation for Visual Recognition
• [CVPR 2025] Recognition-Synergistic Scene Text Editing
• [ICML 2026] Calibrated Multimodal Representation Learning with Missing Modalities
• [ICCV 2025] Generalizable Object Re-Identification via Visual In-Context Prompting
• [CVPR 2026] Beyond Missing Modalities: Hypergraph Guided Diffusion for Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Emotion Recognition