# Structurally Refined Graph Transformer for Multimodal Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00584 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00584/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [Self-supervised Graph Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10783/) (2020)
- [VBPR: Visual Bayesian Personalized Ranking from Implicit Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.01784/) (2015)
- [Mining Latent Structures for Multimedia Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09036/) (2021)
- [Collaborative Learning for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11761/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Accuracy-oriented Neural Recommendation: From Collaborative Filtering to Information-rich Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13030/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Self-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05396/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Graph Neural Networks and Graph Transformers in Computer Vision: A Task-Oriented Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13232/) (2022)
- [Bootstrap Latent Representations for Multi-modal Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05969/) (2022)
- [A Tale of Two Graphs: Freezing and Denoising Graph Structures for Multimodal Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06924/) (2022)
- [Multi-Modal Self-Supervised Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10632/) (2023)
- [Hybrid Transformer with Multi-level Fusion for Multimodal Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02357/) (2022)
- [LGMRec: Local and Global Graph Learning for Multimodal Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16400/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Cross-domain Recommendation: Taxonomies, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03357/) (2021)
- [Graph Transformer for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02330/) (2023)
- [IISAN: Efficiently Adapting Multimodal Representation for Sequential Recommendation with Decoupled PEFT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02059/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Dyadic Relations with Homogeneous Graphs for Multimodal Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12097/) (2023)
- [A challenge-based survey of e-recruitment recommendation systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05112/) (2022)
- [Towards End-to-End Explainable Facial Action Unit Recognition via Vision-Language Joint Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00644/) (2024)
- [Computational Technologies for Fashion Recommendation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03395/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Prompt Transformer with Hybrid Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04456/) (2023)
- [Mirror Gradient: Towards Robust Multimodal Recommender Systems via Exploring Flat Local Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11262/) (2024)
- [AttNS: Attention-Inspired Numerical Solving For Limited Data Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10184/) (2023)
- [Multimodal self-supervised learning for lesion localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01524/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal recommendation systems utilize various types of information, including images and text, to enhance the effectiveness of recommendations. The key challenge is predicting user purchasing behavior from the available data. Current recommendation models prioritize extracting multimodal information while neglecting the distinction between redundant and valuable data. They also rely heavily on a single semantic framework (e.g., local or global semantics), resulting in an incomplete or biased representation of user preferences, particularly those less expressed in prior interactions. Furthermore, these approaches fail to capture the complex interactions between users and items, limiting the model's ability to meet diverse users. To address these challenges, we present SRGFormer, a structurally optimized multimodal recommendation model. By modifying the transformer for better integration into our model, we capture the overall behavior patterns of users. Then, we enhance structural information by embedding multimodal information into a hypergraph structure to aid in learning the local structures between users and items. Meanwhile, applying self-supervised tasks to user-item collaborative signals enhances the integration of multimodal information, thereby revealing the representational features inherent to the data's modality. Extensive experiments on three public datasets reveal that SRGFormer surpasses previous benchmark models, achieving an average performance improvement of 4.47 percent on the Sports dataset. The code is publicly available online.