  Multimodal transfer learning aims to transform pretrained representations of
diverse modalities into a common domain space for effective multimodal fusion.
However, conventional systems are typically built on the assumption that all
modalities exist, and the lack of modalities always leads to poor inference
performance. Furthermore, extracting pretrained embeddings for all modalities
is computationally inefficient for inference. In this work, to achieve high
efficiency-performance multimodal transfer learning, we propose VideoAdviser, a
video knowledge distillation method to transfer multimodal knowledge of
video-enhanced prompts from a multimodal fundamental model (teacher) to a
specific modal fundamental model (student). With an intuition that the best
learning performance comes with professional advisers and smart students, we
use a CLIP-based teacher model to provide expressive multimodal knowledge
supervision signals to a RoBERTa-based student model via optimizing a
step-distillation objective loss -- first step: the teacher distills multimodal
knowledge of video-enhanced prompts from classification logits to a regression
logit -- second step: the multimodal knowledge is distilled from the regression
logit of the teacher to the student. We evaluate our method in two challenging
multimodal tasks: video-level sentiment analysis (MOSI and MOSEI datasets) and
audio-visual retrieval (VEGAS dataset). The student (requiring only the text
modality as input) achieves an MAE score improvement of up to 12.3% for MOSI
and MOSEI. Our method further enhances the state-of-the-art method by 3.4% mAP
score for VEGAS without additional computations for inference. These results
suggest the strengths of our method for achieving high efficiency-performance
multimodal transfer learning.
