CoGR-MoE: Concept-Guided Expert Routing with Consistent Selection and Flexible Reasoning for Visual Question Answering

Xiyin Zeng, Yi Lu, Hao Wang


Abstract
Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires models to identify the correct answer options based on both visual and textual evidence. Recent Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) methods improve option reasoning by grouping similar concepts or routing based on examples. However, unstable routing can lead to inconsistent expert selection in the same question type, while overly stable routing may reduce flexibility. To address this, we propose Concept-Guided Routing framework (CoGR-MoE), which incorporates semantics of the answer options to guide expert selection in the training phase.Next, option features are used to reweight the selected experts, producing discriminative representations for each candidate option. These option-level representations are further used for option comparison and optimized via contrastive learning. The experimental results indicate that CoGR-MoE delivers strong performance across multiple VQA tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.315
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
6333–6350
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.315/
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Cite (ACL):
Xiyin Zeng, Yi Lu, and Hao Wang. 2026. CoGR-MoE: Concept-Guided Expert Routing with Consistent Selection and Flexible Reasoning for Visual Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 6333–6350, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CoGR-MoE: Concept-Guided Expert Routing with Consistent Selection and Flexible Reasoning for Visual Question Answering (Zeng et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.315.pdf
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