# Towards Robust Federated Multimodal Graph Learning under Modality Heterogeneity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12584 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12584/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [SMIL: Multimodal Learning with Severely Missing Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05677/) (2021)
- [Are Multimodal Transformers Robust to Missing Modality?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05454/) (2022)
- [Multi-modal Learning with Missing Modality via Shared-Specific Feature Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14126/) (2023)
- [Multimodal learning with graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03299/) (2022)
- [UniGraph2: Learning a Unified Embedding Space to Bind Multimodal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00806/) (2025)
- [Robust Multimodal Learning with Missing Modalities via Parameter-Efficient Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03986/) (2023)
- [Learning on Multimodal Graphs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05322/) (2024)
- [FIARSE: Model-Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Importance-Aware Submodel Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19389/) (2024)
- [FedMM: Federated Multi-Modal Learning with Modality Heterogeneity in Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15858/) (2024)
- [OpenFGL: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Federated Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16288/) (2024)
- [FedMAC: Tackling Partial-Modality Missing in Federated Learning with Cross-Modal Aggregation and Contrastive Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03070/) (2024)
- [MH-pFLID: Model Heterogeneous personalized Federated Learning via Injection and Distillation for Medical Data Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06822/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Foundation Models for Multi-modal Federated Learning with Incomplete Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11048/) (2024)
- [OpenMAG: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal-Attributed Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05576/) (2026)
- [MM-OpenFGL: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Federated Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22416/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Coupling Perception and Reasoning in Federated Multimodal Graph Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00277/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, multimodal graph learning (MGL) has garnered significant attention for integrating diverse modality information and structured context to support various network applications. However, real-world graphs are often isolated due to data-sharing limitations across multiple parties, and their modalities are frequently incomplete. This highlights an urgent need to develop a robust federated approach. However, we find that existing methods remain insufficient. On the one hand, centralized MGL methods that handle missing modalities overlook the knowledge sharing and generalization in federated scenarios. On the other hand, while federated MGL methods have become increasingly mature, they primarily target non-graph data. Based on these technologies, we identify a two-stage pipeline wherein client-side completion reconstructs missing modalities, and server-side aggregation integrates the client-updated parameters of both the modality generator and the backbone models. Although this serves as a general solution, we identify two primary challenges in achieving greater robustness: (1) Topology-Isolated Local Completion: Client-side modality generation struggles to effectively leverage global semantics. (2) Reliability-Imbalanced Global Aggregation: Server-side multi-party collaboration is hindered by client updates with varying modality availability and recovery reliability. To address these challenges, we propose textscFedMPO, which utilizes topology-aware cross-modal generation to recover missing features using comprehensive graph context, missing-aware expert routing to locally filter out noisy recovered signals, and reliability-aware aggregation to appropriately down-weight unreliable updates. Extensive experiments on 3 tasks across 6 datasets demonstrate that FedMPO outperforms baselines, achieving performance gains of up to 4.10% and 5.65% in high-missing and non-IID settings.