# A Modality-Aware Cooperative Co-Evolutionary Framework for Multimodal Graph Neural Architecture Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07325 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07325/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [IMF: Interactive Multimodal Fusion Model for Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10816/) (2023)
- [Tokenization, Fusion, and Augmentation: Towards Fine-grained Multi-modal Entity Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09468/) (2024)
- [BM-NAS: Bilevel Multimodal Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09379/) (2021)
- [CVSS-BERT: Explainable Natural Language Processing to Determine the Severity of a Computer Security Vulnerability from its Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08510/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Process Surrogate Models for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06028/) (2022)
- [Combinatorial Optimization with Automated Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02872/) (2024)
- [An Adaptable Budget Planner for Enhancing Budget-Constrained Auto-Bidding in Online Advertising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05187/) (2025)
- [Transferrable Surrogates in Expressive Neural Architecture Search Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12971/) (2025)
- [CVE-LLM : Ontology-Assisted Automatic Vulnerability Evaluation Using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15932/) (2025)
- [Knowledge-aware Evolutionary Graph Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17339/) (2024)
- [TG-NAS: Generalizable Zero-Cost Proxies with Operator Description Embedding and Graph Learning for Efficient Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00271/) (2024)
- [ABG-NAS: Adaptive Bayesian Genetic Neural Architecture Search for Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21254/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Co-exploitation attacks on software vulnerabilities pose severe risks to enterprises, a threat that can be mitigated by analyzing heterogeneous and multimodal vulnerability data. Multimodal graph neural networks (MGNNs) are well-suited to integrate complementary signals across modalities, thereby improving attack-prediction accuracy. However, designing an effective MGNN architecture is challenging because it requires coordinating modality-specific components at each layer, which is infeasible through manual tuning. Genetic algorithm (GA)-based graph neural architecture search (GNAS) provides a natural solution, yet existing methods are confined to single modalities and overlook modality heterogeneity. To address this limitation, we propose a modality-aware cooperative co-evolutionary algorithm for multimodal graph neural architecture search, termed MACC-MGNAS. First, we develop a modality-aware cooperative co-evolution (MACC) framework under a divide-and-conquer paradigm: a coordinator partitions a global chromosome population into modality-specific gene groups, local workers evolve them independently, and the coordinator reassembles chromosomes for joint evaluation. This framework effectively captures modality heterogeneity ignored by single-modality GNAS. Second, we introduce a modality-aware dual-track surrogate (MADTS) method to reduce evaluation cost and accelerate local gene evolution. Third, we design a similarity-based population diversity indicator (SPDI) strategy to adaptively balance exploration and exploitation, thereby accelerating convergence and avoiding local optima. On a standard vulnerabilities co-exploitation (VulCE) dataset, MACC-MGNAS achieves an F1-score of 81.67% within only 3 GPU-hours, outperforming the state-of-the-art competitor by 8.7% F1 while reducing computation cost by 27%.