Data-Efficient Multimodal Fusion on a Single GPU

The goal of multimodal alignment is to learn a single latent space that is shared between multimodal inputs. The most powerful models in this space have been trained using massive datasets of paired inputs and large-scale computational resources making them prohibitively expensive to train in many practical scenarios. We surmise that existing unimodal encoders pre-trained on large amounts of unimodal data should provide an effective bootstrap to create multimodal models from unimodal ones at much lower costs. We therefore propose FuseMix a multimodal augmentation scheme that operates on the latent spaces of arbitrary pre-trained unimodal encoders. Using FuseMix for multimodal alignment we achieve competitive performance - and in certain cases outperform state-of-the art methods - in both image-text and audio-text retrieval with orders of magnitude less compute and data: for example we outperform CLIP on the Flickr30K text-to-image retrieval task with ?600x fewer GPU days and ?80x fewer image-text pairs. Additionally we show how our method can be applied to convert pre-trained text-to-image generative models into audio-to-image ones. Code is available at: https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/fusemix.