English

MER-DG: Modality-Entropy Regularization for Multimodal Domain Generalization

Machine Learning 2026-05-05 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

Deploying multimodal models in real-world scenarios requires generalization to new environments where recording conditions differ from training, a challenge known as multimodal domain generalization (MMDG). Standard architectures employ separate encoders for each modality and a fusion module, training the system end-to-end by optimizing on the fused features. In this paper, we identify that such joint optimization causes encoders to exploit cross-modal co-occurrences, statistical relationships between modalities that arise from source-specific recording conditions, rather than learning domain-invariant features. We term this failure mode Fusion Overfitting. To address this, we propose Modality-Entropy Regularization for Domain Generalization (MER-DG), which maximizes the entropy of each encoder's feature distribution to preserve feature diversity. MER-DG is architecture-agnostic and integrates into existing multimodal frameworks as an additive loss term. Extensive experiments on EPIC-Kitchens and HAC benchmarks demonstrate average improvements of approximately 5% over standard fusion and approximately 2% over state-of-the-art methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.01967,
  title  = {MER-DG: Modality-Entropy Regularization for Multimodal Domain Generalization},
  author = {Yavuz Yarici and Ghassan AlRegib},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.01967},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:47:36.058Z