Multimodal Graph Neural Architecture Search under Distribution Shifts

Multimodal graph neural architecture search (MGNAS) has shown great success for automatically designing the optimal multimodal graph neural network (MGNN) architecture by leveraging multimodal representation, crossmodal information and graph structure in one unified framework. However, existing MGNAS fails to handle distribution shifts that naturally exist in multimodal graph data, since the searched architectures inevitably capture spurious statistical correlations under distribution shifts. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Out-of-distribution Generalized Multimodal Graph Neural Architecture Search (OMG-NAS) method which optimizes the MGNN architecture with respect to its performance on decorrelated OOD data. Specifically, we propose a multimodal graph representation decorrelation strategy, which encourages the searched MGNN model to output representations that eliminate spurious correlations through iteratively optimizing the feature weights and controller. In addition, we propose a global sample weight estimator that facilitates the sharing of optimal sample weights learned from existing architectures. This design promotes the effective estimation of the sample weights for candidate MGNN architectures to generate decorrelated multimodal graph representations, concentrating more on the truly predictive relations between invariant features and ground-truth labels. Extensive experiments on real-world multimodal graph datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over SOTA baselines.