Sequential Modality Dropout: A 4-Line Fix for Robust Multi-Modal Recommenders

_reachsumit · x · 2026-08-12

Real-world product catalogs often miss images or text, causing multi-modal recommenders trained on complete data to lose significant accuracy during deployment.

This paper proposes Sequential Modality Dropout (SMD): independently erasing image or text streams with probability $p$ during training. This architecture-agnostic, four-line change significantly improves retention. Under an extreme 95% missing rate, the method retains 61% of HR@10 accuracy, a vast improvement over the 22% baseline.

Original post →

More from Research

Research channel →