CoGR-MoE: Concept-Guided Expert Routing with Consistent Selection and Flexible Reasoning for Visual Question Answering

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission10641 Authors

Keywords: Mixture-of-Experts, Visual Question Answering, Routing Consistency

Abstract: Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires models to identify the correct answer options based on both visual and textual evidence. Recent Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) methods improve option reasoning by grouping similar concepts or routing based on examples. However, unstable routing can lead to inconsistent expert selection in the same question type, while overly stable routing may reduce flexibility. To address this, we propose Concept-Guided Routing framework (CoGR-MoE), which incorporates semantics of the answer options to guide expert selection in the training phase. Next, option features are used to reweight the selected experts, producing discriminative representations for each candidate option. These option-level representations are further used for option comparison and optimized via contrastive learning. The experimental results indicate that CoGR-MoE delivers strong performance across multiple VQA tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Question Answering

Research Area Keywords: Language Modeling, Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 10641