# Knowing When to Trust Images: Reliability-Aware Multi-modal Entity Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23267 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23267/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [The Concrete Distribution: A Continuous Relaxation of Discrete Random Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00712/) (2016)
- [Cross-lingual Entity Alignment via Joint Attribute-Preserving Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05045/) (2017)
- [MMKG: Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05485/) (2019)
- [Multimodal Fusion on Low-quality Data: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18947/) (2024)
- [Visual Pivoting for (Unsupervised) Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13603/) (2020)
- [Aligning Cross-Lingual Entities with Multi-Aspect Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06575/) (2019)
- [Multi-modal Contrastive Representation Learning for Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00891/) (2022)
- [MEAformer: Multi-modal Entity Alignment Transformer for Meta Modality Hybrid](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14454/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Uncertainly Missing and Ambiguous Visual Modality in Multi-Modal Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16210/) (2023)
- [Vision, Deduction and Alignment: An Empirical Study on Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08774/) (2023)
- [Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph Transformer Framework for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06365/) (2023)
- [Pseudo-Label Calibration Semi-supervised Multi-Modal Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01203/) (2024)
- [Progressively Modality Freezing for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16168/) (2024)
- [IBMEA: Exploring Variational Information Bottleneck for Multi-modal Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19302/) (2024)
- [Learning with Dual-level Noisy Correspondence for Multi-modal Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18240/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The visual modality, i.e., images, plays a key role in multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA). Existing approaches often directly fuse the image with other modalities to align different entities. Although simple, such strategies overlook the potential noise in the images and their semantic misalignment with corresponding entities, resulting in suboptimal fusion and degraded performance. Addressing this, we propose a novel Reliability-Aware framework for MMEA (RA-MMEA), which assesses visual reliability and adaptively improves unreliable visual representations for robust entity alignment. The core lies in two modules, including dependency-aware visual reliability prediction (DA-VRP) and stability-regularized visual embedding generation (SR-VEG). The former aims to estimate the reliability of an image by leveraging multi-modal dependency within the entity, while the latter focuses on producing alternative visual representation conditioned on semantics encoded in textual modalities for multi-modal fusion. Compared to current methods, RA-MMEA enables more reliable visual representations for modality fusion, thereby improving performance. In extensive experiments, RA-MMEA achieves state-of-the-art results, verifying the importance of reliable visual modality for entity alignment and the effectiveness of RA-MMEA. The code and results will be released.