Collaboration of Fusion and Independence: Hypercomplex-driven Robust Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph Completion

Zhiqiang Liu, Yichi Zhang, Mengshu Sun, Lei Liang, Wen Zhang


Abstract
Multi-modal knowledge graph completion (MMKGC) aims to discover missing facts in multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs) by leveraging both structural relationships and diverse modality information of entities. Existing MMKGC methods follow two multi-modal paradigms: fusion-based and ensemble-based. Fusion-based methods employ fixed fusion strategies, which inevitably leads to the loss of modality-specific information and a lack of flexibility to adapt to varying modality relevance across contexts. In contrast, ensemble-based methods retain modality independence through dedicated sub-models but struggle to capture the nuanced, context-dependent semantic interplay between modalities. To overcome these dual limitations, we propose a novel MMKGC method M-Hyper, which achieves the coexistence and collaboration of fused and independent modality representations. Our method integrates the strengths of both paradigms, enabling effective cross-modal interactions while maintaining modality-specific information. Inspired by “quaternion” algebra, we utilize its four orthogonal bases to represent multiple independent modalities and employ the Hamilton product to efficiently model pair-wise interactions among them. Specifically, we introduce a Fine-grained Entity Representation Factorization (FERF) module and a Robust Relation-aware Modality Fusion (R2MF) module to obtain robust representations for three independent modalities and one fused modality. The resulting four modality representations are then mapped to the four orthogonal bases of a biquaternion for comprehensive modality interaction. Extensive experiments indicate its state-of-the-art performance with better robustness.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1289
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
27968–27983
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1289/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhiqiang Liu, Yichi Zhang, Mengshu Sun, Lei Liang, and Wen Zhang. 2026. Collaboration of Fusion and Independence: Hypercomplex-driven Robust Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph Completion. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 27968–27983, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Collaboration of Fusion and Independence: Hypercomplex-driven Robust Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph Completion (Liu et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1289.pdf
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