SoftHGNN: Soft Hypergraph Neural Networks for General Visual Recognition

Visual recognition relies on understanding the semantics of image tokens and their complex interactions. Mainstream self-attention methods, while effective at modeling global pair-wise relations, fail to capture high-order associations inherent in real-world scenes and often suffer from redundant computation. Hypergraphs extend conventional graphs by modeling high-order interactions and offer a promising framework for addressing these limitations. However, existing hypergraph neural networks typically rely on static and hard hyperedge assignments, which lead to redundant hyperedges and overlooking the continuity of visual semantics. In this work, we present Soft Hypergraph Neural Networks (SoftHGNN), a lightweight plug-and-play hypergraph computation method for late-stage semantic reasoning in existing vision pipelines. Our SoftHGNN introduces the concept of soft hyperedges, where each vertex is associated with hyperedges via continuous and differentiable participation weights rather than hard binary assignments. These weights are produced by measuring similarities between vertex features and a small set of learnable hyperedge prototypes, yielding input-adaptive and semantically rich soft hyperedges. Using soft hyperedges as the medium for message aggregation and dissemination, SoftHGNN enriches feature representations with high-order contextual associations. To further enhance efficiency when scaling up the number of soft hyperedges, we incorporate a sparse hyperedge selection mechanism that activates only the top-k important hyperedges, along with a load-balancing regularizer to ensure adequate and balanced hyperedge utilization. Experimental results across three tasks on five datasets demonstrate that SoftHGNN efficiently captures high-order associations in visual scenes, achieving significant performance improvements. The code is available at: https://github.com/Mengqi-Lei/SoftHGNN.