# MMGA: Multimodal Learning with Graph Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.09946 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09946/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Strategies for Pre-training Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12265/) (2019)
- [FLAVA: A Foundational Language And Vision Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04482/) (2021)
- [GPT-GNN: Generative Pre-Training of Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15437/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal pre-training breaks down the modality barriers and allows the individual modalities to be mutually augmented with information, resulting in significant advances in representation learning. However, graph modality, as a very general and important form of data, cannot be easily interacted with other modalities because of its non-regular nature. In this paper, we propose MMGA (Multimodal learning with Graph Alignment), a novel multimodal pre-training framework to incorporate information from graph (social network), image and text modalities on social media to enhance user representation learning. In MMGA, a multi-step graph alignment mechanism is proposed to add the self-supervision from graph modality to optimize the image and text encoders, while using the information from the image and text modalities to guide the graph encoder learning. We conduct experiments on the dataset crawled from Instagram. The experimental results show that MMGA works well on the dataset and improves the fans prediction task's performance. We release our dataset, the first social media multimodal dataset with graph, of 60,000 users labeled with specific topics based on 2 million posts to facilitate future research.