Cross-Dimension and Cross-Modality Relational Tensor Representation Learning for Multimodal Health Data Modeling

Jiawei Guo, Meng Zhao

Multimodal health data integrate information from heterogeneous clinical sources, creating substantial opportunities for data-driven decision support. Realizing these opportunities, however, requires effectively modeling complex dependencies that arise both within individual modalities and across modalities. This paper proposes Relational Tensor Representation (RTR), a unified framework that jointly learns dimension-specific tensor representations and cross-dimensional and cross-modality relationships. RTR introduces learnable relational bridge matrices that maintain relational information while preserving the structural identities of tensor dimensions and modalities. A structured fusion mechanism further integrates factor-level and relationship-level information into compact representations for downstream prediction. Experiments on simulated data and two multimodal neurophysiological datasets, covering emotion recognition and brain activity classification, demonstrate that RTR consistently outperforms representative tensor learning, multimodal fusion, and Transformer-based baselines. These results highlight the value of explicitly modeling cross-dimensional and cross-modality…