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MSP: Modality Self-Play for Training Multimodal LLMs Without Paired Cross-Modal Data
摘要
arXiv:2610.20965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large multimodal models have achieved remarkable progress by scaling model capacity and training on massive paired multimodal data. However, this paradigm introduces a fundamental bottleneck: aligned multimodal datasets are expensive to curate, difficult to scale across diverse modality combinations, and increasingly constrain further progress. We introduce Modality Self-Play (MSP), a training framework for multimodal foundation models based on proxy-mediated modality composition. Instead of relying on paired cross-modal data, MSP uses anchor-supporting proxy textual descriptions of unseen modalities as semantic bridges during training. Given an observed modality (e.g., image or audio), the model generates proxy descriptions for complementary unseen modalities, which are then encoded and aligned with the observed modality through learned bridges, enabling cross-modal interaction without real paired non-text supervision. Our central hypothesis is that proxy text, combined with contrastively trained pretrained encoders, provides sufficient semantic structure for multimodal composition to emerge. We show that MSP enables zero-shot modality composition: models trained only with a real anchor modality and accompanying proxy descriptions can integrate and reason over multiple modalities at inference time despite never observing real paired non-text data during training. Empirically, MSP achieves state-of-the-art or competitive perf