MMCOMET: A Large-Scale Multimodal Commonsense Knowledge Graph for Contextual Reasoning
Authors: Eileen Wang, Hiba Arnaout, Dhita Pratama, Shuo Yang, Dangyang Liu, Jie Yang, Josiah Poon, Jeff Pan, Caren Han
Organizations: University of Sydney Sydney, Australia · Technische Universität Darmstadt Darmstadt, Germany · University of Melbourne Melbourne, Australia · University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, United Kingdom · The University of Sydney Sydney, Australia
We present MMCOMET, the first multimodal commonsense knowledge graph (MMKG) that integrates physical, social, and eventive knowledge. MMCOMET extends the ATOMIC2020 knowledge graph to include a visual dimension, through an efficient image retrieval process, resulting in over 900K multimodal triples. This new resource addresses a major limitation of existing MMKGs in supporting complex reasoning tasks like image captioning and storytelling. Through a standard visual storytelling experiment, we show that our holistic approach enables the generation of richer, coherent, and contextually grounded stories than those produced using text-only knowledge. This resource establishes a new foundation for multimodal commonsense reasoning and narrative generation.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. An example of automated visual storytelling: Baseline : Family members enjoyed leisurely moments together. Grandpa shared memories during the trip ; Ours : Family spent the day relaxing in the boat, enjoying beer. Grandpa took the grandson on his lap as he drove, with the grandson’s parents watching nearby.
Figure 2. A small subset of MMCOMET (top) and the Construction Pipeline (bottom).
Web (WSE)
Open-source Data (OID)
Both
Physical
FM+PM
FM
FM+PM
FM
FM+PM
FM
ObjectUse
100
73
96
76
98
74.5
AtLocation
100
92.9
100
100
100
96.4
MadeUpOf
100
100
89.3
89.3
94.1
94.1
HasProperty
92.6
92.6
88.5
84.6
90.6
88.7
CapableOf
95.8
87.5
95.8
70.8
95.8
79.2
Table 2. Human evaluation results showing the percentage of commonsense phrases whose retrieved images were judged as full (FM) or partial matches (PM). Web search (WSE) yields higher matching accuracy than open-source image datasets (OID), particularly for abstract social and eventive relations.
Relation
Avg. Concreteness
Relation
% Heads Searched
Relation
% Tails Searched
React (94228)
2.95
NotDesires
2.82
AtLocation
25.52
Attr (115815)
2.98
Desires
2.85
MadeUpOf
36.47
Causes (376)
3.29
AtLocation
18.78
isAfter
48.98
Intent (49312)
3.40
MadeUpOf
20.03
isBefore
53.50
Effect (113494)
3.53
HasProperty
22.77
CapableOf
59.55
Reason (334)
3.55
CapableOf
23.98
HinderedBy
64.72
Table 3. The left sub-table shows the average concreteness scores for each commonsense relation (sample size in brackets) in ascending order. The second and third sub-tables show the proportion of heads and tail phrases across each relation that required web search. Green, orange and blue highlighting indicate social, event and physical relations, respectively.
Model
R-VG
R-C
R-NR
RoViST (R)
SPICE (S)
BLEURT (B)
MoverScore (M)
UNION (U)
Perplexity
R+S+B+M+U
Story L.
SRL-pmi
70.4
72.8
91.6
78.3
11.5
34.7
56.0
75.9
14.7
256.3
51.2
TGCN-SRL-cos
70.3
72.3
90.5
77.7
10.9
34.9
56.0
84.0
14.9
263.4
52.3
VILT-pmi
71.3
76.4
92.1
79.9
10.2
35.1
54.4
82.2
13.2
261.8
51.2
VILT-cos
70.2
76.3
94.2
80.2
9.3
34.3
52.1
83.3
12.1
259.2
50.1
LLaVa-cos
72.3
78.1
96.1
82.2
9.5
34.1
53.9
84.2
10.5
263.6
51.9
LLaVA-cos-MMCOMET S
73.3
78.4
95.8
82.5
9.9
35.2
54.2
82.6
10.8
264.4
50.8
Table 4. Automatic evaluation results of visual storytelling. MMCOMET-enhanced models (bottom rows) outperform baselines (SRL-pmi and TGCN-SRL-cos) in visual grounding, coherence, and overall story quality metrics, demonstrating the benefit of multimodal commonsense knowledge (for Perplexity , lower score is better.)
Model
VQA
Image Captioning
Acc.
BLEU
CIDEr
BLEURT
Qwen2.5-VL
0.630
0.481
0.258
0.357
Qwen2.5-VL+MMCOMET
0.642
0.498
0.296
0.363
Table 5. Automatic evaluation results of VQA, using ∼ 189k validation data from VQAv2, and Image Captioning tasks using Flickr30k. MMCOMET-enhanced model (bottom row) outperforms the baseline in both tasks and all metrics, demonstrating the benefit of multimodal commonsense knowledge.
Image
Baseline (SRL-pmi)
Ours (LLaVA-cos-MMCOMET S+I )
Merchants set up their booths.
Merchants set up vibrant booths filled with handmade goods .
It was a family gathering.
It was a family gathering in a restaurant where everyone enjoyed various delicacies .
Celebrated with a birthday cake.
Blowing out the candles of her birthday cake, she made a wish for happiness and adventure .
Table 6. Selected story frames and their associated text to showcase the effect of MMCOMET in visual story telling.
Table 7. Selected visual question-answer exemplars to showcase the effect of MMCOMET as additional contexts for VQA tasks. (GT: Ground Truth, Baseline: Qwen2.5-VL Only, Ours: Qwen2.5-VL-MMCOMET-augmented)
Image
Baseline
Ours
A woman cradles a sleeping child, both appearing calm and serene.
A woman tenderly holds a sleeping child, symbolizing the comfort and care provided by a mother.
A person walks down a wet brick sidewalk under a yellow checkered umbrella, wearing a black coat and tall boots.
A person walks down a wet sidewalk under a yellow umbrella, protecting themselves from the rain.
A young boy wearing a blue cap looks through a telescope, focusing intently on the view.
A young boy observes through a telescope, learning about the wonders of the cosmos.
Table 8. Comparison of image captions from baseline and MMCOMET-enhanced models to provide the impact of MMCOMET in image captioning tasks. (GT: Ground Truth, Baseline: Qwen2.5-VL Only, Ours: Qwen2.5-VL-MMCOMET-augmented)
Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs) benefit from visual information, yet large-scale image collection is hard to curate and often excludes ambiguous but relevant visuals (e.g., logos, symbols, abstract scenes). We present Beyond Images, an automatic data-centric enrichment pipeline with optional human auditing. This pipeline operates in three stages: (1) large-scale retrieval of additional entity-related images, (2) conversion of all visual inputs into textual descriptions to ensure that ambiguous images contribute usable semantics rather than noise, and (3) fusion of multi-source descriptions using a large language model (LLM) to generate concise, entity-aligned summaries. These summaries replace or augment the text modality in standard MMKG models without changing their architectures or loss functions. Across three public MMKG datasets and multiple baseline models, we observe consistent gains (up to 7% Hits@1 overall). Furthermore, on a challenging subset of entities with visually ambiguous logos and symbols, converting images into text yields large improvements (201.35% MRR and 333.33% Hits@1). Additionally, we release a lightweight Text-Image Consistency Check Interface for optional targeted audits, improving description quality and dataset reliability. Our results show that scaling image coverage and converting ambiguous visuals into text is a practical path to stronger MMKG completion. Code, datasets, and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/pengyu-zhang/Beyond-Images.
Pengyu Zhang, Klim Zaporojets, Jie Liu +2
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands · Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark · Amazon AGI, Seattle, USA
Multimodal knowledge graphs (MMKGs) organize information across different modalities to support multimodal Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which aims to improve the performance of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The effectiveness of these multimodal Graph RAG methods largely depends on the quality of the constructed MMKGs. However, most existing methods construct MMKGs without explicit guidance on graph quality, while reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods that rely on final-answer correctness may provide only indirect feedback on MMKG quality. To address these limitations, we propose MMKG-R1, a novel MMKG-quality-driven RL framework for training an MLLM as a multimodal knowledge constructor. To be specific, MMKG-R1 introduces multiple quality-aware rewards to directly evaluate both the quality of information extracted from individual knowledge sources and the quality of the assembled MMKG. These rewards are then used to guide the RL training. Experiments across multiple datasets show that MMKG-R1 constructs MMKGs that improve downstream question-answering accuracy.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet existing systems struggle with complex cross-modal reasoning. Flat vector retrieval often ignores structural dependencies, while current graph-based methods rely on costly ``translation-to-text'' pipelines that discard fine-grained visual information. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{MG2-RAG}, a lightweight Multi-Granularity Graph RAG framework that jointly improves graph construction, modality fusion, and cross-modal retrieval. MG2-RAG constructs a hierarchical multimodal knowledge graph by combining lightweight textual parsing with entity-driven visual grounding, enabling textual entities and visual regions to be fused into unified multimodal nodes that preserve atomic evidence. Building on this representation, we introduce a multi-granularity graph retrieval mechanism that aggregates dense similarities and propagates relevance across the graph to support structured multi-hop reasoning. Extensive experiments across four representative multimodal tasks (i.e., retrieval, knowledge-based VQA, reasoning, and classification) demonstrate that MG2-RAG consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing graph construction overhead with an average 43.3× speedup and 23.9× cost reduction compared with advanced graph-based frameworks.
Sijun Dai, Qiang Huang, Xiaoxing You +1
School of Intelligence Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) · School of Computer Science, Hangzhou Dianzi University