Achieving Cross Modal Generalization with Multimodal Unified Representation

This paper introduces a novel task called Cross Modal Generalization (CMG), which addresses the challenge of learning a unified discrete representation from paired multimodal data during pre-training. Then in downstream tasks, the model can achieve zero-shot generalization ability in other modalities when only one modal is labeled. Existing approaches in multimodal representation learning focus more on coarse-grained alignment or rely on the assumption that information from different modalities is completely aligned, which is impractical in real-world scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose \textbf{Uni-Code}, which contains two key contributions: the Dual Cross-modal Information Disentangling (DCID) module and the Multi-Modal Exponential Moving Average (MM-EMA). These methods facilitate bidirectional supervision between modalities and align semantically equivalent information in a shared discrete latent space, enabling fine-grained unified representation of multimodal sequences. During pre-training, we investigate various modality combinations, including audio-visual, audio-text, and the tri-modal combination of audio-visual-text. Extensive experiments on various downstream tasks, i.e., cross-modal event classification, localization, cross-modal retrieval, query-based video segmentation, and cross-dataset event localization, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. The code is available at https://github.com/haihuangcode/CMG.