Modalities Should Talk to Each Other: Dual-Stream Multimodal Learning for Long-Horizon Influenza Forecasting· 模态应互动:用于长期流感预测的双流多模态学习
Forecasting long-range influenza-like illness (ILI) matters for public health readiness. Publicly available surveillance datasets typically pair numeric epidemiological signals with textual information that is noisy, loosely structured, only indirectly related to near-term trends, and often lagged relative to the numeric signal. Fusing the two therefore requires careful design. We propose Dual-Stream Attention (DSA), a multimodal deep learning framework that forecasts 12-week-ahead ILI activity from a 36-week multimodal history by letting the numerical and textual streams condition each other. Using the Time-MMD health-domain dataset, DSA separately encodes the two modalities with a Transformer-based numerical encoder and a domain-adapted headline encoder, then couples them through a bidir