Structured Kernel Surrogate Models for Multimodal Attribution

arXiv:2611.13198v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of cross-sample modality attribution, which involves measuring how one modality in one sample affects the learning outcome in other multimodal samples. This problem is crucial in a multimodal system because a data modality (such as a text description) may be redundant for one sample (a self-explanatory image), but the same data modality would otherwise be uniquely informative for another sample, or informative when combined with other modalities. Prior work focuses on influence estimation at the level of one sample, and it remains an open question how one should capture the interactions across both samples and modalities.