Glossary · Multimodal systems
Modality Alignment
Learning or establishing correspondences between representations from different modalities so semantically or temporally related items can be matched.
Why it matters
Fusion and cross-modal retrieval fail when the system cannot connect the same event, object, or concept across differently structured inputs.
In practice
Define positive and negative pairs, preserve time or spatial metadata, evaluate mismatched examples, and measure alignment separately from downstream task accuracy.
Common confusion
Alignment makes representations comparable or corresponding. It does not require them to become identical or erase modality-specific information.
Related terms
Sources
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