Shaping Initial State Prevents Modality Competition in Multi-modal Fusion: A Two-stage Scheduling Framework via Fast Partial Information Decomposition

Abstract

Multi-modal fusion often suffers from modality competition during joint training, where one modality dominates the learning process, leaving others under-optimized. Overlooking the critical impact of the model's initial state, most existing methods address this issue during the joint learning stage. In this study, we introduce a two-stage training framework to shape the initial states through unimodal training before the joint training. First, we propose the concept of Effective Competitive Strength (ECS) to quantify a modality's competitive strength. Our theoretical analysis further reveals that properly shaping the initial ECS by unimodal training achieves a provably tighter error bound. However, ECS is computationally intractable in deep neural networks. To bridge this gap, we develop a framework comprising two core components: a fine-grained computable diagnostic metric and an asynchronous training controller. For the metric, we first prove that mutual information(MI) is a principled proxy for ECS. Considering MI is induced by per-modality marginals and thus treats each modality in isolation, we further propose FastPID, a computationally efficient and differentiable solver for partial information decomposition, which decomposes the joint distribution's information into fine-grained measurements: modality-specific uniqueness, redundancy, and synergy. Guided by these measurements, our asynchronous controller dynamically balances modalities by monitoring uniqueness and locates the ideal initial state to start joint training by tracking peak synergy. Experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our work establishes that shaping the pre-fusion models' initial state is a powerful strategy that eases competition before it starts, reliably unlocking synergistic multi-modal fusion.