Robust Multimodal Recommendation via Graph Retrieval-Enhanced Modality Completion
Abstract
Multimodal data plays a critical role in web-based recommendation systems, where information from diverse modalities such as vision and text enhances representation learning. However, real-world multimodal datasets often suffer from modality incompleteness due to sensor failures, annotation scarcity, or privacy constraints, which substantially degrade model performance and reliability. One effective solution to address this issue is modality completion, which reconstructs missing features to provide modality-complete graphs for downstream tasks. Given a query node with missing multimodal features, existing modality completion methods typically infer information from the node itself or its neighbors to reconstruct the missing modality. However, these methods may overlook semantically relevant context in the graph, which contains valuable cues that are non-trivial to capture through simple methods like neighborhood aggregation. In this work, we propose GRE-MC, a Graph Retrieval–Enhanced Modality Completion framework, to overcome these limitations. By introducing a modality-aware subgraph retrieval mechanism, GRE-MC selects semantically relevant subgraphs from the entire graph, providing richer contextual information for completing missing modalities. Subsequently, a graph transformer jointly encodes the query node and the retrieved subgraph via global attention to complete the missing features, while a learnable sparse-routing codebook regularizes latent embeddings into compact bases for improved robustness. Extensive experiments on multimodal recommendation benchmarks demonstrate that GRE-MC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of subgraph retrieval and joint-encoding graph transformer for robust modality completion.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lianghao Xia | 62 | 84 LightGCL: Simple Yet Effective Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 84 Automated Self-Supervised Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 83 Self-Supervised Hypergraph Transformer for Recommender Systems (2022) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 2 | Jiuqiang Li 0002 | 60 | 62 Multi-view Semantic Contrastive Alignment for Multimodal Recommendation (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 59 Graph Diffusive Self-Supervised Learning for Social Recommendation (2024) Social and Group Recommendation 47 Disentangled Contrastive Bundle Recommendation with Conditional Diffusion (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 3 | Xubin Ren | 55 | 70 LightGCL: Simple Yet Effective Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 70 SSLRec: A Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 69 Disentangled Contrastive Collaborative Filtering (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Leyu Lin | 46 |
Area-chair candidates (4)
| Leyu Lin assigned | 46 | 15 papers | |
| Weiming Liu 0005 | 44 | 8 papers | |
| Qiaoyu Tan | 43 | 7 papers | |
| Kun Gai | 39 | 5 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yinwei Wei COI: co-author | 74 | 3 | 100 Modality-Independent Graph Neural Networks with Global Transformers for Multimodal Recommendation (2025) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 100 Multi-modal Bipartite Graph Structure Learning with Information Bottleneck for Micro-video Recommendation (2026) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 2 | Lianghao Xia assigned | 62 | 3 | 84 LightGCL: Simple Yet Effective Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 84 Automated Self-Supervised Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 3 | Ke Wang 0038 | 60 | 3 | 85 Review-Enhanced Hierarchical Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 85 Multi-aspect Graph Contrastive Learning for Review-enhanced Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 4 | Jiuqiang Li 0002 assigned | 60 | 3 | 62 Multi-view Semantic Contrastive Alignment for Multimodal Recommendation (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 59 Graph Diffusive Self-Supervised Learning for Social Recommendation (2024) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 5 | Mengyuan Jing | 60 | 3 | 70 Review-Enhanced Hierarchical Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 70 Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation for Recommendation (2022) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 6 | Yi Zhang 0103 | 56 | 3 | 84 MixRec: Individual and Collective Mixing Empowers Data Augmentation for Recommender Systems (2025) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 84 Unveiling Contrastive Learning's Capability of Neighborhood Aggregation for Collaborative Filtering (2025) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 7 | Xubin Ren assigned | 55 | 3 | 70 LightGCL: Simple Yet Effective Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 70 SSLRec: A Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 8 | Dongxiao He | 52 | 3 | 70 Self-Supervised Graph Neural Networks via Diverse and Interactive Message Passing (2022) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 70 A New Mechanism for Eliminating Implicit Conflict in Graph Contrastive Learning (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 9 | Wei Wei 0027 | 52 | 3 | 69 Multi-Modal Self-Supervised Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 69 Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 10 | Chunyang Wang 0001 | 51 | 3 | 100 Guiding Graph Learning with Denoised Modality for Multi-modal Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 85 Review-Enhanced Hierarchical Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 11 | Xin Zhang 0091 | 48 | 3 | 48 Multi-Modal Correction Network for Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Denoising and Robustness 43 Deep Dynamic Interest Learning With Session Local and Global Consistency for Click-Through Rate Predictions (2022) CTR and Conversion Rate Prediction |
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| 12 | Yongjing Hao | 46 | 3 | 83 LMACL: Improving Graph Collaborative Filtering with Learnable Model Augmentation Contrastive Learning (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 83 Meta-optimized Structural and Semantic Contrastive Learning for Graph Collaborative Filtering (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 14 | Miaomiao Cai 0001 | 45 | 3 | 54 I3-MRec: Invariant Learning with Information Bottleneck for Incomplete Modality Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Denoising and Robustness 54 Multimodality Invariant Learning for Multimedia-Based New Item Recommendation (2024) Content and Attribute-Based Cold-Start Recommendation |
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| 15 | Xiaolong Liu 0012 | 45 | 3 | 60 Graph-based Alignment and Uniformity for Recommendation (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 59 Group Identification via Transitional Hypergraph Convolution with Cross-view Self-supervised Learning (2023) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 16 | Lantao Hu | 45 | 3 | 70 Towards Robust Recommendation via Decision Boundary-aware Graph Contrastive Learning (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 58 Soft Contrastive Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 17 | Hao Deng 0011 | 45 | 3 | 50 ESANS: Effective and Semantic-Aware Negative Sampling for Large-Scale Retrieval Systems (2025) Multimodal Denoising and Robustness 44 MMQ: Multimodal Mixture-of-Quantization Tokenization for Semantic ID Generation and User Behavioral Adaptation (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 19 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 44 | 3 | 84 Enhancing Graph Contrastive Learning with Reliable and Informative Augmentation for Recommendation (2025) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 43 Generative Recommender with End-to-End Learnable Item Tokenization (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 20 | Chen Wang 0052 | 43 | 3 | 60 Graph-based Alignment and Uniformity for Recommendation (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 48 Group Identification via Transitional Hypergraph Convolution with Cross-view Self-supervised Learning (2023) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 21 | Jiancan Wu | 43 | 3 | 84 Self-supervised Graph Learning for Recommendation (2021) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 82 Graph Contrastive Learning With Negative Propagation for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 23 | Yong He 0009 | 43 | 3 | 60 Global-Aware Model-Free Self-distillation for Recommendation System (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 44 The Devil is in the Sources! Knowledge Enhanced Cross-Domain Recommendation in an Information Bottleneck Perspective (2024) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR |
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| 24 | Min Hou 0004 | 43 | 3 | 54 Unified Representation Learning for Discrete Attribute Enhanced Completely Cold-Start Recommendation (2025) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 54 Multimodality Invariant Learning for Multimedia-Based New Item Recommendation (2024) Content and Attribute-Based Cold-Start Recommendation |
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| 25 | Yixin Liu 0001 COI: co-author | 42 | 3 | 70 Learning Strong Graph Neural Networks with Weak Information (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 70 Beyond Smoothing: Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning with Edge Heterophily Discriminating (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 26 | Jiangxia Cao | 42 | 3 | 58 QARM: Quantitative Alignment Multi-Modal Recommendation at Kuaishou (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 44 Disentangled Representations Learning for Multi-target Cross-domain Recommendation (2023) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR |
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| 27 | Mingdai Yang | 42 | 3 | 60 Graph-based Alignment and Uniformity for Recommendation (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 59 Group Identification via Transitional Hypergraph Convolution with Cross-view Self-supervised Learning (2023) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 28 | Lingling Yi | 42 | 3 | 72 Dual Interests-Aligned Graph Auto-Encoders for Cross-domain Recommendation in WeChat (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 67 Item-Provider Co-learning for Sequential Recommendation (2022) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 29 | Lichan Hong | 41 | 3 | 60 Self-supervised Learning for Large-scale Item Recommendations (2021) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 44 Better Generalization with Semantic IDs: A Case Study in Ranking for Recommendations (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 30 | Yongxin Ni | 41 | 3 | 55 Teach Me How to Denoise: A Universal Framework for Denoising Multi-modal Recommender Systems via Guided Calibration (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 46 Causality-Inspired Fair Representation Learning for Multimodal Recommendation (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods |
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| 31 | Riwei Lai | 41 | 3 | 53 Disentangled Negative Sampling for Collaborative Filtering (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 40 DAR: Dimension-Adaptive Recommendation with Multi-Granular Noise Control (2025) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift |
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| 32 | Jinxin Hu | 41 | 3 | 59 Distribution-Guided Auto-Encoder for User Multimodal Interest Cross Fusion (2025) Content-Based Transferable Recommendation 50 ESANS: Effective and Semantic-Aware Negative Sampling for Large-Scale Retrieval Systems (2025) Multimodal Denoising and Robustness |
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| 33 | Ed H. Chi | 41 | 3 | 60 Self-supervised Learning for Large-scale Item Recommendations (2021) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 44 Better Generalization with Semantic IDs: A Case Study in Ranking for Recommendations (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |