When Fusion Order Matters: Insights on Progressive Multimodal Representation Learning for Cross-modal Retrieval

Haoxiang Zhao, Bin Wang, Yaofei Wang, Xiao Lan, Yunfeng Diao +1

Multimodal video retrieval combines visual, acoustic, and speech information, yet how their fusion order should depend on the data and the retrieval query remains unclear. We introduce Unified Progressive Representation Learning for Order Analysis, or UniPRO, to investigate this question through configurable fusion schedules with matched model components and training settings. Starting from text-to-video retrieval, we find that the tested one-by-one schedules outperform stacked fusion, while changing the order within one-by-one fusion also changes performance. To guide order selection, we examine two complementary considerations: learning difficulty under unequal modality availability and preservation of information relevant to the query. Complete-modality controls show that missing inputs alone cannot explain order sensitivity. At R@1, text and audio retrieval favor schedules that introduce the modality matching the query last. Controlled speech missingness during training and testing reverses the preferred order in both R@1 and SumR, with different crossover points. These findings motivate balancing the two considerations when selecting a fusion path. We then use them to…