Glossary · Multimodal systems
Late Fusion
Processing modalities through separate encoders or predictors and combining their high-level representations, scores, or decisions near the task output.
Why it matters
Separate branches can use modality-specific architectures and tolerate missing inputs, though they may miss fine-grained interactions available to earlier fusion.
In practice
Calibrate each branch, define how missing modalities affect the merge, compare score-level and feature-level combinations, and evaluate each branch alone as an ablation.
Common confusion
Late fusion describes the position of combination. It does not mean simple averaging or guarantee that the modalities contribute equally.
Related terms
Sources
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