Towards Unified Multimodal Graph Foundation Model: A Bridge-Router-Adapter Based Approach

Abstract

Multimodal graphs couple node attributes in different modalities, such as text and images, with relational structure, enabling topological structure and cross-modality attributes to be modeled jointly. Multimodal graph foundation models seek unified representations from such data that transfer across different graph domains and downstream tasks. However, existing methods exhibit two fundamental limitations. (1) Cross-Scope Context Entanglement. They merge scope-specific graph contexts into a unified representation, obscuring their distinctions during multimodal construction. (2) Scope-Ignorant Modality Routing. They route modalities within a fixed graph scope, overlooking how modality relevance varies across neighborhood ranges. To address these challenges, we propose BRAIN, a unified model that focuses on graph context that combines neighborhood scope with modality composition. BRAIN comprises a scope-conditioned Bridge that combines structural information spanning local-to-global neighborhood scopes with different modality compositions; a hierarchical Router that estimates the relevance between the scope and the task, and selects compositions separately within each scope, allowing modality utility to vary with graph range; and a lightweight residual Adapter that further specializes the routed embedding for downstream prediction. BRAIN is trained through multi-graph pretraining followed by task-specific adaptation. Experiments across nine datasets and four task families demonstrate its broad effectiveness, improving node-classification and link-prediction performance by up to 4.73% relative to the strongest baseline, while achieving an average relative improvement of 14.72% across four graph-to-text and two graph-to-image metrics.