Towards Quantum-Driven Multimodal Machine Learning: Methods, Challenges, and Future Directions
Debashis Das, Jaclyn Claiborne, Lexus Brinkley-Tapp +3 more
Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved remarkable progress in single-modal tasks such as text analysis and image recognition. Several real-world problems often demand multimodal intelligence that can integrate and reason across diverse data sources. Traditional machine learning methods face scalability and efficiency limitations for handling heterogeneous multimodal datasets. Recent work in quantum computing introduces new opportunities for AI using superposition and entanglement. Quantum Machine Learning (QML) has shown early promise in classification, optimization, and learning, but applications to multimodal intelligence remain at an early stage. Existing studies are fragmented, and there is a lack of systematic understanding of how QML can address the challenges of multimodal learning. Therefore, this paper provides a structured survey of QML approaches for multimodal tasks. We review data encoding strategies, quantum models such as quantum support vector machines and variational quantum circuits, and hybrid quantum-classical frameworks. We analyze their strengths, limitations, current applications, and future directions. Our findings show that QML faces obstacles in scalability, noise, and benchmarking for efficient cross-modal reasoning and representation. Quantum generative models and quantum-inspired multimodal architectures could significantly expand the capabilities of AI in the future. It highlights both the opportunities and open challenges in applying QML to multimodal intelligence. Overall, the paper provides researchers with a roadmap for advancing this field and sets the stage for future applications in precision medicine, autonomous systems, cybersecurity, and climate modeling.
IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems and Applications (TPS-ISA)•Nov 12, 2025•0 citations