Information Router for Mitigating Modality Dominance in Vision-Language Models

Original Abstract

Vision Language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of benchmarks, yet they often suffer from modality dominance, where predictions rely disproportionately on a single modality. Prior approaches primarily address this issue by steering model's attention allocation, implicitly assuming that all modalities provide sufficient information. However, attention only determines where the model focuses, and cannot enrich information that is missing or ambiguous. In the real world, input modalities often differ in information density and their signal-to-noise ratios. In such cases, simply adjusting model's attention does not resolve the underlying lack of information. In this paper, we propose \textsc{MoIR}: \textit{Multi-modal Information Router}, an information-level fusion method that explicitly reduces information disparity prior to fusion. \textsc{MoIR} identifies less informative tokens and routes complementary information from a stronger modality, constructing information-dense token representations before they are processed by a large language model. By modifying information availability, \textsc{MoIR} enables reliable shifts in modality dominance, even when one modality is degraded. We evaluate \textsc{MoIR} on three widely used multi-modal benchmarks across multiple model backbones. Experimental results show that \textsc{MoIR} consistently demonstrates more balanced modality contribution, and improves robustness and downstream performance, particularly even under modality degradation. These findings demonstrate that explicitly modifying cross-modal information is an effective and complementary strategy for mitigating modality dominance in multi-modal reasoning models.