How do Multimodal AI models work? Simple explanation

Mohammad Shahil
5 min readDec 25, 2023

According to a report, the healthcare industry is expected to be the largest user of multimodal AI technology, with a CAGR of 40.5% from 2020 to 2027.

By harnessing the power of multimodal AI, businesses can improve accuracy, efficiency, and effectiveness across a range of operations, resulting in better outcomes and increased competitiveness

Machine use as a human for example Humans use the five senses to experience and interpret the world around them. Our five senses capture information from five different sources and five different modalities. A modality refers to the way in which something happens, is experienced, or captured.

Machines also capture different data types and use multimodels to train the models of ai.

What is Multimodal AI?

Multimodal AI is an advanced form of artificial intelligence that is able to analyze and interpret multiple modes of data simultaneously, allowing it to generate more accurate and human-like responses. Unlike traditional AI systems that typically rely on a single source of data, multimodal AI can combine information from different sources, such as images, sound, and text, to create a more nuanced understanding of a given situation.

OR

Multimodal AI is a new AI paradigm, in which various data types (image, text, speech, numerical data) are combined with multiple intelligence processing algorithms to achieve higher performances.

Unimodal vs. Multimodal

An unimodal AI system like ChatGPT, for example, uses natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to understand and extract meaning from text content, and the only type of output the chatbot can produce is text.

If future iterations of ChatGPT are multimodal, for example, a marketer who uses the generative AI bot to create text-based web content could prompt the bot to create images that accompany the text it generates.

How does Multimodal AI work?

The development of multimodal models requires sophisticated algorithms that can integrate and analyze data from multiple sources. This involves techniques such as feature extraction, machine learning, and neural networks that can process and interpret complex data sets.

Multimodal AI architecture typically consists of several key components, including the input module, fusion module, and output module.

Multimodal AI architecture typically consists of several key components, including the input module, fusion module, and output module.

The input module consists of unimodal neural networks that receive and preprocess different types of data separately. This module may use different techniques, such as natural language processing or computer vision, depending on the specific modality. For example, when processing text data, the input module may use techniques such as tokenization, stemming, and part-of-speech tagging to extract meaningful information from the text.

After extraction, the fusion module comes into the scene to integrate information from multiple modalities, such as text, images, audio, and video. It can take many forms, from simple operations like concatenation to more complex approaches such as attention mechanisms, graph convolutional networks, or transformer models.

The goal of the fusion module is to capture the relevant information from each modality and combine it in a way that leverages the strengths of each modality.

A novel multi-modal fusion method that synthesizes image, text, audio and video as inputs. example: ImageBind of meta (multisenseroy AI Era)

An output module is responsible for generating the final output or prediction based on the information processed and fused by the earlier stages of the architecture.

Last but not least, the output module, takes the fused information as input and generates a final output or prediction in a form that is meaningful to the task at hand. For example, if the task is to classify an image based on its content and a textual description, the output module might generate a label or a ranking of labels corresponding to the most likely classes that the image belongs to.

Nevertheless, the purpose is to generate an actionable output based on the input from multiple modalities, thus enabling the system to perform complex tasks that were not possible to achieve with a single modality.

Diffusion models are generative models, which means that they generate new data based on the data they are trained on.

Advantages of Multimodal AI

Challenges

Multimodal AI is more challenging to create than unimodal AI due to several factors. They include:

  • Data integration: Combining and synchronizing different types of data can be challenging because the data from multiple sources will not have the same formats
  • Feature representation: Each modality has its own unique characteristics and representation methods. example for image use CNNor text use RNNor LLM Model,
  • Dimensionality and scalability: Multimodal data is typically high-dimensional, and there are no mechanisms for dimensionality reduction because each modality contributes its own set of features.
  • Model architecture and fusion techniques: Designing effective architectures and fusion techniques to combine information from multiple modalities is still an area of ongoing research
  • Availability of labeled data: collecting and annotating data sets with diverse modalities are difficult, and it can be expensive to maintain large-scale multimodal training datasets.

The Future of Multimodal AI

  • Autonomous vehicles
  • Healthcare
  • Video understanding
  • Human-computer interaction
  • Content recommendation
  • Social media analysis
  • Robotics
  • Smart assistive technologies

In conclusion, the multimodal model is an important concept in the field of artificial intelligence that has the potential to revolutionize the way we process and analyze information. By incorporating data from multiple modalities, AI systems can achieve greater accuracy, efficiency, and human-like reasoning, paving the way for a more intelligent and connected world.

FOR extra deep into multimodel read https://www.techopedia.com/definition/multimodal-ai-multimodal-artificial-intelligence

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Mohammad Shahil
Mohammad Shahil

Written by Mohammad Shahil

Passionate about the realms of ML and AI. mission to explore, learn, and innovate in these dynamic field. transform data into insights & drive meaningful impact

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well explained ! Thank you for sharing

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