Paper Detail

Joint-Centric Dual Contrastive Alignment with Structure-Preserving and Information-Balanced Regularization

Habibeh Naderi, Behrouz Haji Soleimani, Stan Matwin

arxiv Score 8.3

Published 2026-04-17 · First seen 2026-04-20

General AI

Abstract

We propose HILBERT (HIerarchical Long-sequence Balanced Embedding with Reciprocal contrastive Training), a cross-attentive multimodal framework for learning document-level audio-text representations from long, segmented sequences in low-resource data settings. HILBERT leverages frozen pre-trained speech and language encoders to extract segment-level features, which are aggregated via cross-modal attention and self-attentive pooling to form modality-specific document representations and a joint cross-attentive embedding. To align modalities while preserving modality-specific structure under severe audio-text dimensional imbalance, we introduce a reciprocal dual contrastive objective that simultaneously aligns audio-to-joint and text-to-joint representations, rather than directly contrasting audio and text alone. Two auxiliary regularizers further stabilize long-sequence fusion: a Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) loss that preserves structural consistency between each modality and the joint embedding, and a mutual information balancing loss that prevents dominance of a single modality by equalizing information flow from audio and text into the joint space. For downstream prediction, HILBERT employs a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) classifier over concatenated audio, text, and joint representations to accommodate heterogeneous label regimes. Extensive evaluation across multiple audio-text backbone combinations demonstrates that HILBERT learns semantically meaningful long-sequence representations and achieves superior performance on highly imbalanced multi-class settings.

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BibTeX

@article{naderi2026joint,
  title = {Joint-Centric Dual Contrastive Alignment with Structure-Preserving and Information-Balanced Regularization},
  author = {Habibeh Naderi and Behrouz Haji Soleimani and Stan Matwin},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {We propose HILBERT (HIerarchical Long-sequence Balanced Embedding with Reciprocal contrastive Training), a cross-attentive multimodal framework for learning document-level audio-text representations from long, segmented sequences in low-resource data settings. HILBERT leverages frozen pre-trained speech and language encoders to extract segment-level features, which are aggregated via cross-modal attention and self-attentive pooling to form modality-specific document representations and a joint c},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16247},
  keywords = {cs.LG, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2604.16247},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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