MAG-SCOUT：判断多模态数据何时该做图化

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Abstract:Multimodal graph learning has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for in corporating inter-entity relationships into multimodal representations. Existing studies have made substantial progress on how to construct and optimize graphs, but rarely consider a more fundamental question: whether additional relational structures should be introduced for a given dataset and task. Through empirical studies across diverse datasets, tasks, and graph constructors, we reveal that graphification is not consistently beneficial: introducing relational structures can provide substantial improvements in some cases, while offering limited or even negative gains. This observation motivates a new perspective that graph construction should be treated as a selective decision based on its expected utility rather than a default preprocessing step. To address this issue, we propose MAG-SCOUT, a pre-construction graph assessment framework that estimates whether introducing graph structures is beneficial before generating the complete topology. MAG-SCOUT collects limited relational evidence, analyzes its potential taskspecific contribution, and estimates the expected utility of graphification together with construction cost to make a build-or-skip decision. Extensive experiments across six multimodal datasets, three downstream tasks, and diverse graph constructors demonstrate that MAG-SCOUT effectively identifies when graph structures should be introduced, saving 33.1% of task-macro graph work while retaining 96.7% of held-out positive-gain mass under the pre-registered floor.

Subjects:	Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as:	arXiv:2610.02768 [cs.LG]
	(or arXiv:2610.02768v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
	https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.02768 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Zekai Chen [view email]
[v1] Fri, 2 Oct 2026 03:48:52 UTC (478 KB)