Multimodal learning is a type of deep learning that integrates and processes multiple types of data, referred to as modalities, such as text, audio, images, or video. This integration allows for a more holistic understanding of complex data, improving model performance in tasks like visual question answering, cross-modal retrieval, text-to-image generation, aesthetic ranking, and image captioning.
Large multimodal models, such as Google Gemini and GPT-4o, have become increasingly popular since 2023, enabling increased versatility and a broader understanding of real-world phenomena.