Together, Then Apart: Revisiting Multimodal Survival Analysis via a Min-Max Perspective

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18089v1
• Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2025 15:10:46 GMT
• Title: Together, Then Apart: Revisiting Multimodal Survival Analysis via a Min-Max Perspective
• Authors: Wenjing Liu, Qin Ren, Wen Zhang, Yuewei Lin, Chenyu You,
• Abstract summary: This work revisits multi-modal survival analysis via the dual lens of alignment and distinctiveness.<n>We introduce Together-Then-Apart, a unified min-max optimization framework that simultaneously models shared and modality-specific representations.<n>Our formulation provides a new theoretical perspective of how alignment and distinctiveness can be jointly achieved in for robust, interpretable, and biologically meaningful multi-modal survival analysis.
• Score: 22.583594870571336
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Integrating heterogeneous modalities such as histopathology and genomics is central to advancing survival analysis, yet most existing methods prioritize cross-modal alignment through attention-based fusion mechanisms, often at the expense of modality-specific characteristics. This overemphasis on alignment leads to representation collapse and reduced diversity. In this work, we revisit multi-modal survival analysis via the dual lens of alignment and distinctiveness, positing that preserving modality-specific structure is as vital as achieving semantic coherence. In this paper, we introduce Together-Then-Apart (TTA), a unified min-max optimization framework that simultaneously models shared and modality-specific representations. The Together stage minimizes semantic discrepancies by aligning embeddings via shared prototypes, guided by an unbalanced optimal transport objective that adaptively highlights informative tokens. The Apart stage maximizes representational diversity through modality anchors and a contrastive regularizer that preserve unique modality information and prevent feature collapse. Extensive experiments on five TCGA benchmarks show that TTA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Beyond empirical gains, our formulation provides a new theoretical perspective of how alignment and distinctiveness can be jointly achieved in for robust, interpretable, and biologically meaningful multi-modal survival analysis.

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