Boosting Discriminability for Robust Multimodal Entity Linking with Visual Modality Missing

Multimodal Entity Linking (MEL) aims to retrieve ambiguous mentions within multimodal contexts to the referent entities in a multimodal knowledge base, typically based on the assumption of modality completeness. However, when deployed in open-world applications, MEL systems may encounter uncertainly missing of visual modalities from user-proposed mentions. In this paper, we propose a novel setting dubbed MEL-MM to simulate the practical challenge, and reveal that the semantic discriminability is a crucial factor to enhance the anti-missingness resilience. To this end, we introduce an innovative yet efficient approach termed Cross-View Introspective Ranking Distillation (CVIRD), which seeks to sufficiently align the linking similarities between teacher and student models trained from modality-complete and incomplete data. To be specific, as the first concept in CVIRD, Missing-Aware Ranking Distillation (MARD) focuses on modeling the discriminability by formulating the similarity rankings between mention and entities in a missing-sensitive and differentiable manner. Moreover, the second concept of Cross-View Distillation with Introspection (CVDI) aims to improve discriminability extraction in MARD through multi-level distillation, considering both cross-view retrieval and self-consistency. Experiments verify the effectiveness and model-agnostic ability of our method, which achieves superior performance in contrast to competitive missingness-resilient strategies.