Weakly-Supervised Multimodal Learning on MIMIC-CXR

Multimodal data integration and label scarcity pose significant challenges for machine learning in medical settings. To address these issues, we conduct an in-depth evaluation of the newly proposed Multimodal Variational Mixture-of-Experts (MMVM) VAE on the challenging MIMIC-CXR dataset. Our analysis demonstrates that the MMVM VAE consistently outperforms other multimodal VAEs and fully supervised approaches, highlighting its strong potential for real-world medical applications.

Unity by Diversity: Improved Representation Learning in Multimodal VAEs

Variational Autoencoders for multimodal data hold promise for many tasks in data analysis, such as representation learning, conditional generation, and imputation. Current architectures either share the encoder output, decoder input, or both across modalities to learn a shared representation. Such architectures impose hard constraints on the model. In this work, we show that a better latent representation can be obtained by replacing these hard constraints with a soft constraint. We propose a new mixture-of-experts prior, softly guiding each modality's latent representation towards a shared aggregate posterior. This approach results in a superior latent representation and allows each encoding to preserve information from its uncompressed original features better. In extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets and a challenging real-world neuroscience data set, we show improved learned latent representations and imputation of missing data modalities compared to existing methods.