Probe-Guided Gradient Balancing for Multimodal Learning

Abstract

Jointly trained multimodal networks frequently underutilize weaker modalities, as faster-learning modalities dominate the shared fusion objective and suppress gradients reaching slower ones. Most existing approaches throttle dominant modalities, whereas directly boosting weaker modalities often fails because monitoring signals derived from the joint loss remain dominated by stronger modalities. We propose Probe-Guided Gradient Boosting (PGGB), a gradient modulation approach that boosts weaker modalities while preserving the strength of dominant ones. PGGB attaches lightweight linear classifiers to stop-gradient features from each modality to estimate representation quality independently. The gap between these scores, termed the utilization gap, provides an imbalance signal used to adaptively scale weaker-modality gradients through bounded and smoothed modulation. PGGB is composable with throttling methods, as it leaves the loss function and fusion architecture unchanged. Experiments across eight benchmarks spanning four domains and 2-4 modalities demonstrate that PGGB outperforms state-of-the-art methods on highly imbalanced multimodal datasets while remaining competitive under low or negligible imbalance. We further establish bounded scaling, self-attenuation, and a descent bound for standard SGD under smoothness and bounded-variance assumptions. Code is available at https://github.com/VuVoCodes/PGGB.