Multimodal-attributed graphs (MAGs) are a fundamental data structure for multimodal graph learning (MGL), enabling both graph-centric and modality-centric tasks. However, our empirical analysis reveals inherent topology quality limitations in real-world MAGs, including noisy interactions, missing connections, and task-agnostic relational structures. A single graph derived from generic relationships is therefore unlikely to be universally optimal for diverse downstream tasks. To address this challenge, we propose Task-aware Modality and Topology co-Evolution (TMTE), a novel MGL framework that jointly and iteratively optimizes graph topology and multimodal representations toward the target task. TMTE is motivated by the bidirectional coupling between modality and topology: multimodal attributes induce relational structures, while graph topology shapes modality representations. Concretely, TMTE casts topology evolution as multi-perspective metric learning over modality embeddings with an anchor-based approximation, and formulates modality evolution as smoothness-regularized fusion with cross-modal alignment, yielding a closed-loop task-aware co-evolution process. Extensive experiments on 9 MAG datasets and 1 non-graph multimodal dataset across 6 graph-centric and modality-centric tasks show that TMTE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TMTE-1873.
Humans are able to create rich representations of their external reality. Their internal representations allow for cross-modality inference, where available perceptions can induce the perceptual experience of missing input modalities. In this paper, we contribute the Multimodal Hierarchical Variational Auto-encoder (MHVAE), a hierarchical multimodal generative model for representation learning. Inspired by human cognitive models, the MHVAE is able to learn modality-specific distributions, of an arbitrary number of modalities, and a joint-modality distribution, responsible for cross-modality in…
School of Electronics and Information Technology, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学电子与信息工程学院）
Learning joint embedding space for various modalities is of vital importance for multimodal fusion. Mainstream modality fusion approaches fail to achieve this goal, leaving a modality gap which heavily affects cross-modal fusion. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial encoder-decoder-classifier framework to learn a modality-invariant embedding space. Since the distributions of various modalities vary in nature, to reduce the modality gap, we translate the distributions of source modalities into that of target modality via their respective encoders using adversarial training. Furthermore…
Token-Level Contrastive Learning with Modality-Aware Prompting for Multimodal Intent Recognition
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Hebei University of Science and Technology（河北科技大学）
For better user experience and business effectiveness, Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction has been one of the most important tasks in E-commerce. Although extensive CTR prediction models have been proposed, learning good representation of items from multimodal features is still less investigated, considering an item in E-commerce usually contains multiple heterogeneous modalities. Previous works either concatenate the multiple modality features, that is equivalent to giving a fixed importance weight to each modality; or learn dynamic weights of different modalities for different items through…
Saarland University（萨尔大学）；MPI for Software Systems（马克斯·普朗克软件系统研究所）
A number of variational autoencoders (VAEs) have recently emerged with the aim of modeling multimodal data, e.g., to jointly model images and their corresponding captions. Still, multimodal VAEs tend to focus solely on a subset of the modalities, e.g., by fitting the image while neglecting the caption. We refer to this limitation as modality collapse. In this work, we argue that this effect is a consequence of conflicting gradients during multimodal VAE training. We show how to detect the sub-graphs in the computational graphs where gradients conflict (impartiality blocks), as well as how to l…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Multimodal learning (MML) aims to jointly exploit the common priors of different modalities to compensate for their inherent limitations. However, existing MML methods often optimize a uniform objective for different modalities, leading to the notorious "modality imbalance" problem and counterproductive MML performance. To address the problem, some existing methods modulate the learning pace based on the fused modality, which is dominated by the better modality and eventually results in a limited improvement on the worse modal. To better exploit the features of multimodal, we propose Prototypi…
Addressing Missing and Noisy Modalities in One Solution: Unified Modality-Quality Framework for Low-quality Multimodal Data
Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；South China Normal University（华南师范大学）；School of Electronics and Information Technology（电子与信息学院）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
Multimodal Sentiment Analysis is an active area of research that leverages multimodal signals for affective understanding of user-generated videos. The predominant approach, addressing this task, has been to develop sophisticated fusion techniques. However, the heterogeneous nature of the signals creates distributional modality gaps that pose significant challenges. In this paper, we aim to learn effective modality representations to aid the process of fusion. We propose a novel framework, MISA, which projects each modality to two distinct subspaces. The first subspace is modality-invariant, w…
Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute（清华-伯克利深圳学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Multimodal learning has achieved great successes in many scenarios. Compared with unimodal learning, it can effectively combine the information from different modalities to improve the performance of learning tasks. In reality, the multimodal data may have missing modalities due to various reasons, such as sensor failure and data transmission error. In previous works, the information of the modality-missing data has not been well exploited. To address this problem, we propose an efficient approach based on maximum likelihood estimation to incorporate the knowledge in the modality-missing data.…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Facebook AI
To reduce a model size but retain performance, we often rely on knowledge distillation (KD) which transfers knowledge from a large "teacher" model to a smaller "student" model. However, KD on multimodal datasets such as vision-language tasks is relatively unexplored, and digesting multimodal information is challenging since different modalities present different types of information. In this paper, we perform a large-scale empirical study to investigate the importance and effects of each modality in knowledge distillation. Furthermore, we introduce a multimodal knowledge distillation framework…
Buffer replay enhances the robustness of multimodal learning under missing-modality
College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Hunan University（湖南大学计算机科学与电子工程学院）；School of Computer Science Central South University（中南大学计算机学院）
Balanced Multimodal Learning: An Unidirectional Dynamic Interaction Perspective
Institute of Big Data Science and Industry（大数据科学与产业研究院）；Key Laboratory of Evolutionary Science Intelligence of Shanxi Province（山西省进化智能科学重点实验室）；Shanxi University（山西大学）
In this paper, we propose a deep multimodal fusion network to fuse multiple modalities (face, iris, and fingerprint) for person identification. The proposed deep multimodal fusion algorithm consists of multiple streams of modality-specific Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which are jointly optimized at multiple feature abstraction levels. Multiple features are extracted at several different convolutional layers from each modality-specific CNN for joint feature fusion, optimization, and classification. Features extracted at different convolutional layers of a modality-specific CNN represen…
Resilient Vision-Tabular Multimodal Learning under Modality Missingness
Research Unit of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Systems, Department of Engineering, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma（人工智能与计算机系统研究单位，工程系，罗马生物医学大学）；Department of Diagnostics and Intervention, Radiation Physics, Biomedical Engineering, Umeå University（诊断与干预系，辐射物理，生物医学工程，乌梅大学）
MACS: Modality-Aware Capacity Scaling for Efficient Multimodal MoE Inference
School of Software, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China（清华大学软件学院，北京，中国）；TJUNLP Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin University, China（天津大学计算机科学与技术学院，中国）；School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University, China（天津大学新媒体与传播学院，中国）
