# Multimodal Graph Transformer for Multimodal Question Answering

Source: [Multimodal Graph Transformer for Multimodal Question Answering](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6f361e209131cea44765>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T01:15:37.285Z

Authors: Xuehai He, Xin Eric Wang

Published: 2023-04-30T21:22:35.000Z

## Abstract

Despite the success of Transformer models in vision and language tasks, they often learn knowledge from enormous data implicitly and cannot utilize structured input data directly. On the other hand, structured learning approaches such as graph neural networks (GNNs) that integrate prior information can barely compete with Transformer models. In this work, we aim to benefit from both worlds and propose a novel Multimodal Graph Transformer for question answering tasks that requires performing reasoning across multiple modalities. We introduce a graph-involved plug-and-play quasi-attention mechanism to incorporate multimodal graph information, acquired from text and visual data, to the vanilla self-attention as effective prior. In particular, we construct the text graph, dense region graph, and semantic graph to generate adjacency matrices, and then compose them with input vision and language features to perform downstream reasoning. Such a way of regularizing self-attention with graph information significantly improves the inferring ability and helps align features from different modalities. We validate the effectiveness of Multimodal Graph Transformer over its Transformer baselines on GQA, VQAv2, and MultiModalQA datasets.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.00581>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.00581.pdf>)
