MoEMoE: Question Guided Dense and Scalable Sparse Mixture-of-Expert for Multi-source Multi-modal Answering

Vinay Kumar Verma, Shreyas Sunil Kulkarni, Happy Mittal, Deepak Gupta


Abstract
Question Answering (QA) and Visual Question Answering (VQA) are well-studied problems in the language and vision domain. One challenging scenario involves multiple sources of information, each of a different modality, where the answer to the question may exist in one or more sources. This scenario contains richer information but is highly complex to handle. In this work, we formulate a novel question-answer generation (QAG) framework in an environment containing multi-source, multimodal information. The answer may belong to any or all sources; therefore, selecting the most prominent answer source or an optimal combination of all sources for a given question is challenging. To address this issue, we propose a question-guided attention mechanism that learns attention across multiple sources and decodes this information for robust and unbiased answer generation. To learn attention within each source, we introduce an explicit alignment between questions and various information sources, which facilitates identifying the most pertinent parts of the source information relative to the question. Scalability in handling diverse questions poses a challenge. We address this by extending our model to a sparse mixture-of-experts (sparse-MoE) framework, enabling it to handle thousands of question types. Experiments on T5 and Flan-T5 using three datasets demonstrate the model’s efficacy, supported by ablation studies.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-industry.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 3: Industry Track)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Weizhu Chen, Yi Yang, Mohammad Kachuee, Xue-Yong Fu
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
62–69
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-industry.6/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vinay Kumar Verma, Shreyas Sunil Kulkarni, Happy Mittal, and Deepak Gupta. 2025. MoEMoE: Question Guided Dense and Scalable Sparse Mixture-of-Expert for Multi-source Multi-modal Answering. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 3: Industry Track), pages 62–69, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MoEMoE: Question Guided Dense and Scalable Sparse Mixture-of-Expert for Multi-source Multi-modal Answering (Verma et al., NAACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-industry.6.pdf