Modality as Heterogeneity: Node Splitting and Graph Rewiring for Multimodal Graph Learning
On the map: Mixture-of-experts → Multimodal MoE models
Abstract (arXiv)
Multimodal graphs are gaining increasing attention due to their rich representational power and wide applicability, yet they introduce substantial challenges arising from severe modality confusion. To address this issue, we propose NSG (Node Splitting Graph)-MoE, a multimodal graph learning framework that integrates a node-splitting and graph-rewiring mechanism with a structured Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. It explicitly decomposes each node into modality-specific components and assigns relation-aware experts to process heterogeneous message flows, thereby preserving structural information and multimodal semantics while mitigating the undesirable mixing effects commonly observed in general-purpose GNNs. Extensive experiments on three multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that NSG-MoE consistently surpasses strong baselines. Despite incorporating MoE -- which is typically computationally heavy -- our method achieves competitive training efficiency. Beyond empirical results, we provide a spectral analysis revealing that NSG performs adaptive filtering over modality-specific subspaces, thus explaining its disentangling behavior. Furthermore, an information-theoretic analysis shows that the architectural constraints imposed by NSG reduces mutual information between data and parameters and improving generalization capability.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal MoE models, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts. Builds on 47 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2026.
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Other references · 46
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