# RHEA: Reliability-Harmonized Reconstruction and Assignment for Robust Multimodal-Attributed Graph Clustering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00621 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00621/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Computational Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00567/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14945/) (2020)
- [RedCaps: web-curated image-text data created by the people, for the people](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11431/) (2021)
- [Trusted Multi-View Classification with Dynamic Evidential Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11423/) (2022)
- [Attributed Graph Clustering: A Deep Attentional Embedding Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06532/) (2019)
- [Towards Unsupervised Deep Graph Structure Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06367/) (2022)
- [Deep Graph Clustering via Dual Correlation Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14772/) (2021)
- [Deep Multimodal Learning with Missing Modality: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07825/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Graph Encoder for Attributed Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01594/) (2020)
- [Multi-view Contrastive Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11842/) (2021)
- [Deep Fusion Clustering Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09600/) (2020)
- [Hard Sample Aware Network for Contrastive Deep Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08665/) (2022)
- [A Tale of Two Graphs: Freezing and Denoising Graph Structures for Multimodal Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06924/) (2022)
- [Attention-driven Graph Clustering Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05499/) (2021)
- [Dink-Net: Neural Clustering on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18405/) (2023)
- [DiffMM: Multi-Modal Diffusion Model for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11781/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Modularity Maximization for Graph Clustering: A Contrastive Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14288/) (2024)
- [Cross-Contrastive Clustering for Multimodal Attributed Graphs with Dual Graph Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20030/) (2025)
- [OpenMAG: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal-Attributed Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05576/) (2026)
- [Reliable Node Similarity Matrix Guided Contrastive Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03765/) (2024)
- [A Clustering-guided Contrastive Fusion for Multi-view Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13726/) (2022)
- [RSEA-MVGNN: Multi-View Graph Neural Network with Reliable Structural Enhancement and Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07331/) (2024)
- [Incomplete Graph Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12412/) (2025)
- [Training-free Adjustable Polynomial Graph Filtering for Ultra-fast Multimodal Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04406/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal-attributed graphs (MAGs), whose nodes carry heterogeneous attributes such as text and images over a relational structure, have become a fundamental substrate for label-free entity grouping tasks, including community discovery and product segmentation. Existing MAG clustering methods effectively integrate complementary modalities when attributes are clean and complete, but degrade substantially under noisy or missing attributes because they implicitly assume equal modality reliability across all nodes. In practice, modality reliability is inherently node-specific: images may be corrupted or absent, while textual descriptions are incomplete or noisy. We argue that, under attribute homophily, graph neighborhoods naturally provide supervision-free evidence for estimating node-specific modality reliability. Based on this insight, we propose RHEA, a reliability-aware framework for MAG clustering that estimates node-specific modality reliability from neighborhood consensus and propagates this signal throughout the clustering pipeline. RHEA reconstructs unreliable or missing modalities from graph neighborhoods, adaptively weights modalities during reliability-aware fusion, and performs topology-aware optimal transport clustering with reliability-aware transport assignment and neighbor-consensus assignment distillation. Furthermore, the confidence of reconstructed representations is incorporated into the clustering objective, allowing uncertain reconstructions to contribute proportionally during optimization. Experiments on four MAG benchmarks under five attribute conditions show that RHEA consistently outperforms the strongest baseline, with NMI gains increasing as attribute quality deteriorates.