Adaptive Hierarchical Representation Alliance for Multimodal Learning

Abstract

Multimodal models often align language, vision, and audio in a single final-layer latent space, implicitly assuming that task-relevant evidence emerges at the same semantic depth across modalities. Using layer-wise CKA analysis, we observe that this assumption leads to semantic granularity mismatch: textual cues usually require deeper contextual abstraction, whereas visual and acoustic cues often provide discriminative perceptual evidence in shallow or middle layers. This mismatch can flatten fine-grained modality-private cues and reduce reliability under noisy, imbalanced, or missing inputs. To address this, we proposed Adaptive Hierarchical Representation Alliance (AHRA), a hierarchical shared--private expert framework. AHRA factorizes each modality into shared and private streams across semantic levels, regularizes them with shared alignment and private decorrelation, routes shared information through a cross-modal expert, and enhances task-relevant private tokens with modality-specific experts guided by a sparsity-controlled soft-gating mechanism (foreground exam). A hierarchical co-fusion module then performs intra-level expert coordination and inter-level semantic selection. Experiments on six benchmarks across image-text classification, multimodal intent recognition, and trimodal sentiment analysis show that AHRA consistently improves over strong baselines and remains robust under noisy and missing-modality settings.

This study has been accepted by EMNLP 2026 (Findings)