Retrieval-Augmented Dynamic Prompt Tuning for Incomplete Multimodal Learning

Multimodal learning with incomplete modality is practical and challenging. Recently, researchers have focused on enhancing the robustness of pre-trained MultiModal Transformers (MMTs) under missing modality conditions by applying learnable prompts. However, these prompt-based methods face several limitations: (1) incomplete modalities provide restricted modal cues for task-specific inference, (2) dummy imputation for missing content causes information loss and introduces noise, and (3) static prompts are instance-agnostic, offering limited knowledge for instances with various missing conditions. To address these issues, we propose RAGPT, a novel Retrieval-AuGmented dynamic Prompt Tuning framework. RAGPT comprises three modules: (I) the multi-channel retriever, which identifies similar instances through a within-modality retrieval strategy, (II) the missing modality generator, which recovers missing information using retrieved contexts, and (III) the context-aware prompter, which captures contextual knowledge from relevant instances and generates dynamic prompts to largely enhance the MMT's robustness. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets show that RAGPT consistently outperforms all competitive baselines in handling incomplete modality problems. The code of our work and prompt-based baselines is available atthis https URL.

@article{lang2025_2501.01120,
  title={ Retrieval-Augmented Dynamic Prompt Tuning for Incomplete Multimodal Learning },
  author={ Jian Lang and Zhangtao Cheng and Ting Zhong and Fan Zhou },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.01120},
  year={ 2025 }
}