# Tackling Multimodal Learning Challenges with Mixture-of-Expert: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27431 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27431/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal MoE models, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 42 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [Multimodal MoE models](https://mlsanity.com/moe/multimodal-moe-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [Conflict-Averse Gradient Descent for Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14048/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Learning with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06488/) (2022)
- [What Makes Training Multi-Modal Classification Networks Hard?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12681/) (2019)
- [MoE-LLaVA: Mixture of Experts for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15947/) (2024)
- [From Sparse to Soft Mixtures of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00951/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Mixture of Experts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06204/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Contrastive Learning with LIMoE: the Language-Image Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02770/) (2022)
- [Boosting Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models via Mixture-of-Experts Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11549/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13165/) (2023)
- [Not All Experts are Equal: Efficient Expert Pruning and Skipping for Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14800/) (2024)
- [RAPHAEL: Text-to-Image Generation via Large Mixture of Diffusion Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18295/) (2023)
- [Eagle: Exploring The Design Space for Multimodal LLMs with Mixture of Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15998/) (2024)
- [ERNIE-ViLG 2.0: Improving Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Knowledge-Enhanced Mixture-of-Denoising-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15257/) (2022)
- [Uni-MoE: Scaling Unified Multimodal LLMs with Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11273/) (2024)
- [Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10739/) (2024)
- [MoVA: Adapting Mixture of Vision Experts to Multimodal Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13046/) (2024)
- [Flex-MoE: Modeling Arbitrary Modality Combination via the Flexible Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08245/) (2024)
- [FuseMoE: Mixture-of-Experts Transformers for Fleximodal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03226/) (2024)
- [MoMa: Efficient Early-Fusion Pre-training with Mixture of Modality-Aware Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21770/) (2024)
- [CuMo: Scaling Multimodal LLM with Co-Upcycled Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05949/) (2024)
- [Upcycling Large Language Models into Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07524/) (2024)
- [Med-MoE: Mixture of Domain-Specific Experts for Lightweight Medical Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10237/) (2024)
- [MoME: Mixture of Multimodal Experts for Generalist Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12709/) (2024)
- [CL-MoE: Enhancing Multimodal Large Language Model with Dual Momentum Mixture-of-Experts for Continual Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00413/) (2025)
- [MoAI: Mixture of All Intelligence for Large Language and Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07508/) (2024)
- [I2MoE: Interpretable Multimodal Interaction-aware Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19190/) (2025)
- [Omni-SMoLA: Boosting Generalist Multimodal Models with Soft Mixture of Low-rank Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00968/) (2023)
- [M4oE: A Foundation Model for Medical Multimodal Image Segmentation with Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09446/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) presents a naturally compatible and scalable framework for multimodal learning, demonstrating strong adaptability across diverse modalities and tasks. Despite its growing success, a comprehensive and systematic review on the MoE metho addressing multimodal challenges remains lacking. Existing surveys tend to evaluate either multimodal learning or MoE independently from method taxonomy, overlooking the unique interplay between them. This survey fills that gap by answering a central question: textitHow does MoE effectively resolve multimodal challenges? We approach this from three key perspectives: (1) MoE as an Efficient Multimodal Engine: enabling scalable multimodal modeling by decoupling computational cost from parameter growth and mitigating modality redundancy through selective expert activation; (2) MoE as a Multimodal Representation Learner: integrating complementary multi-opinion expert knowledge to enrich alignment and interaction representations; and (3) MoE as a Multimodal Adapter: providing a modular and flexible mechanism to model imperfect data scenarios such as modality imbalance and missing modality. Through our extensive literature review, we identify critical research gaps, including interpretable routing, expert communication, modality integration, and lifelong multimodal learning. We position this survey as a foundation for future research toward interpretable and sustainable multimodal Mixture-of-Experts system.