Multimodal Graph Learning: A Survey of Models, Benchmarks, and Frontiers

Rui Xue, Tianfu Wu

Multimodal attributed graphs (MAGs), in which nodes carry text, images, and other modalities while edges encode relations among entities, underlie e-commerce, social media, content platforms, and creative applications. Learning on MAGs has developed along two complementary lines: graph-centric methods redesign how modalities are fused, propagated, and connected within message passing, while foundation-model-centric methods pretrain transferable multimodal graph encoders or bring graph context into multimodal large language models for prediction and generation. In parallel, several benchmarks have appeared with different datasets and evaluation protocols. This survey takes an algorithm-centric and evaluation-grounded view of the field and makes three contributions. Modeling: we introduce a unified message-passing formulation and organize methods into five integration levels (feature, propagation, topology, learning, and foundation model), covering discriminative and graph-conditioned generative models; within this formulation we derive representative methods as special cases, compare their assumptions, expressiveness, and cost, and identify cross-modal sensitivity as a property…