Abstract
The visual modality, i.e., images, plays a key role in multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA). Existing approaches often directly fuse the image with other modalities to align different entities. Although simple, such strategies overlook the potential noise in the images and their semantic misalignment with corresponding entities, resulting in suboptimal fusion and degraded performance. Addressing this, we propose a novel Reliability-Aware framework for MMEA (RA-MMEA), which assesses visual reliability and adaptively improves unreliable visual representations for robust entity alignment. The core lies in two modules, including dependency-aware visual reliability prediction (DA-VRP) and stability-regularized visual embedding generation (SR-VEG). The former aims to estimate the reliability of an image by leveraging multi-modal dependency within the entity, while the latter focuses on producing alternative visual representation conditioned on semantics encoded in textual modalities for multi-modal fusion. Compared to current methods, RA-MMEA enables more reliable visual representations for modality fusion, thereby improving performance. In extensive experiments, RA-MMEA achieves state-of-the-art results, verifying the importance of reliable visual modality for entity alignment and the effectiveness of RA-MMEA. The code and results will be released.
Keywords
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Publication details
- Journal
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- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Li, C., Feng, Y., Liu, D., Nie, D., Huang, Y., & Fan, H. (2026). Knowing When to Trust Images: Reliability-Aware Multi-modal Entity Alignment. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/knowing-when-to-trust-images-reliability-aware-multi-modal-entity-alignment
MLA 9
Li, Chenxiao, et al. "Knowing When to Trust Images: Reliability-Aware Multi-modal Entity Alignment." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/knowing-when-to-trust-images-reliability-aware-multi-modal-entity-alignment.
Chicago (author–date)
Li, Chenxiao, Yunhe Feng, Dongfang Liu, Dong Nie, Yan Huang, and Heng Fan. 2026. "Knowing When to Trust Images: Reliability-Aware Multi-modal Entity Alignment." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/knowing-when-to-trust-images-reliability-aware-multi-modal-entity-alignment.
Harvard
Li, C., Feng, Y., Liu, D., Nie, D., Huang, Y. and Fan, H. (2026) 'Knowing When to Trust Images: Reliability-Aware Multi-modal Entity Alignment', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/knowing-when-to-trust-images-reliability-aware-multi-modal-entity-alignment.
Vancouver
Li C, Feng Y, Liu D, Nie D, Huang Y, Fan H. Knowing When to Trust Images: Reliability-Aware Multi-modal Entity Alignment. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/knowing-when-to-trust-images-reliability-aware-multi-modal-entity-alignment
IEEE
C. Li, Y. Feng, D. Liu, D. Nie, Y. Huang, and H. Fan, "Knowing When to Trust Images: Reliability-Aware Multi-modal Entity Alignment," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/knowing-when-to-trust-images-reliability-aware-multi-modal-entity-alignment.