Joint, Decoupled, or Agent: When Each Multimodal Alignment Paradigm Wins

arXiv cs.AIOctober 20, 2026en

arXiv:2610.24108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Jointly pretrained multimodal encoders are a common way to combine modalities, while alternatives integrate their information during downstream training or inference. When does each approach win? We compare three paradigms, instantiated with public checkpoints, across 16 paired datasets in five domains and multiple training-label budgets. JOINT trains a fusion head on frozen, jointly pretrained encoders. DECOUPLED trains a fusion head on frozen, independently pretrained encoders. AGENT gives a frozen LLM task instructions, labelled examples, available sample text, and supervised unimodal readouts. No paradigm dominates the complete 144 dataset-

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