Modality Equilibrium Matters: Minor-Modality-Aware Adaptive Alternating for Cross-Modal Memory Enhancement

Multimodal fusion is susceptible to modality imbalance, where dominant modalities overshadow weak ones, easily leading to biased learning and suboptimal fusion, especially for incomplete modality conditions. To address this problem, we introduce an Equilibrium Deviation Metric (EDM) to quantify this imbalance and verify, in both theoretical and empirical terms, that the optimization order of modalities plays a critical role in approaching equilibrium. In particular, we demonstrate that an EDM-ra