Several machine learning algorithms have been developed for the prediction of Alzheimer's disease and related dementia (ADRD) from spontaneous speech. However, none of these algorithms have been translated for the prediction of broader cognitive impairment (CI), which in some cases is a precursor and risk factor of ADRD. In this paper, we evaluated several speech-based open-source methods originally proposed for the prediction of ADRD, as well as methods from multimodal sentiment analysis for the task of predicting CI from patient audio recordings. Results demonstrated that multimodal methods outperformed unimodal ones for CI prediction, and that acoustics-based approaches performed better than linguistics-based ones. Specifically, interpretable acoustic features relating to affect and prosody were found to significantly outperform BERT-based linguistic features and interpretable linguistic features, respectively. All the code developed for this study is available at https://github.com/JTColonel/catch.
Current Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) and Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) methods based on pre-trained language models exhibit two primary limitations: 1) Once trained for MSA and ERC tasks, these pre-trained language models lose their original generalized capabilities. 2) They demand considerable computational resources. As the size of pre-trained language models continues to grow, training larger multimodal sentiment analysis models using previous approaches could result in unnecessary computational cost. In response to this challenge, we propose \textbf{M}ultimodal \textbf{S}entiment Analysis and \textbf{E}motion Recognition \textbf{Adapter} (MSE-Adapter), a lightweight and adaptable plugin. This plugin enables a large language model (LLM) to carry out MSA or ERC tasks with minimal computational overhead (only introduces approximately 2.6M to 2.8M trainable parameters upon the 6/7B models), while preserving the intrinsic capabilities of the LLM. In the MSE-Adapter, the Text-Guide-Mixer (TGM) module is introduced to establish explicit connections between non-textual and textual modalities through the Hadamard product. This allows non-textual modalities to better align with textual modalities at the feature level, promoting the generation of higher-quality pseudo tokens. Extensive experiments were conducted on four public English and Chinese datasets using consumer-grade GPUs and open-source LLMs (Qwen-1.8B, ChatGLM3-6B-base, and LLaMA2-7B) as the backbone. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed plugin. The code will be released on GitHub after a blind review.
Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) identifies individuals' sentiment states in videos by integrating visual, audio, and text modalities. Despite progress in existing methods, the inherent modality heterogeneity limits the effective capture of interactive sentiment features across modalities. In this paper, by introducing a Multi-Modality Collaborative Learning (MMCL) framework, we facilitate cross-modal interactions and capture enhanced and complementary features from modality-common and modality-specific representations, respectively. Specifically, we design a parameter-free decoupling module and separate uni-modality into modality-common and modality-specific components through semantics assessment of cross-modal elements. For modality-specific representations, inspired by the act-reward mechanism in reinforcement learning, we design policy models to adaptively mine complementary sentiment features under the guidance of a joint reward. For modality-common representations, intra-modal attention is employed to highlight crucial components, playing enhanced roles among modalities. Experimental results, including superiority evaluations on four databases, effectiveness verification of each module, and assessment of complementary features, demonstrate that MMCL successfully learns collaborative features across modalities and significantly improves performance. The code can be available at https://github.com/smwanghhh/MMCL.
Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) leverages heterogeneous modalities, such as language, vision, and audio, to enhance the understanding of human sentiment. While existing models often focus on extracting shared information across modalities or directly fusing heterogeneous modalities, such approaches can introduce redundancy and conflicts due to equal treatment of all modalities and the mutual transfer of information between modality pairs. To address these issues, we propose a Disentangled-Language-Focused (DLF) multimodal representation learning framework, which incorporates a feature disentanglement module to separate modality-shared and modality-specific information. To further reduce redundancy and enhance language-targeted features, four geometric measures are introduced to refine the disentanglement process. A Language-Focused Attractor (LFA) is further developed to strengthen language representation by leveraging complementary modality-specific information through a language-guided cross-attention mechanism. The framework also employs hierarchical predictions to improve overall accuracy. Extensive experiments on two popular MSA datasets, CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, demonstrate the significant performance gains achieved by the proposed DLF framework. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the feature disentanglement module, language-focused attractor, and hierarchical predictions. Our code is available at https://github.com/pwang322/DLF.
Despite multimodal sentiment analysis being a fertile research ground that merits further investigation, current approaches take up high annotation cost and suffer from label ambiguity, non-amicable to high-quality labeled data acquisition. Furthermore, choosing the right interactions is essential because the significance of intra- or inter-modal interactions can differ among various samples. To this end, we propose Semi-IIN, a Semi-supervised Intra-inter modal Interaction learning Network for multimodal sentiment analysis. Semi-IIN integrates masked attention and gating mechanisms, enabling effective dynamic selection after independently capturing intra- and inter-modal interactive information. Combined with the self-training approach, Semi-IIN fully utilizes the knowledge learned from unlabeled data. Experimental results on two public datasets, MOSI and MOSEI, demonstrate the effectiveness of Semi-IIN, establishing a new state-of-the-art on several metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/flow-ljh/Semi-IIN.
Sentiment and emotion understanding are essential to applications such as human-computer interaction and depression detection. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate robust general capabilities, they face considerable challenges in the field of affective computing, particularly in detecting subtle facial expressions and handling complex emotion-related tasks, such as emotion reason inference and understanding emotions in long-context scenarios. Furthermore, there is a lack of a unified MLLM that can effectively handle both sentiment and emotion-related tasks. To address these challenges, we explore multi-task training strategies for MLLMs in affective computing and introduce Emotion Universe (EmoVerse), an MLLM designed to handle a broad spectrum of sentiment and emotion-related tasks. In addition, EmoVerse is capable of deeply analyzing the underlying causes of emotional states. We also introduce the Affective Multitask (AMT) Dataset, which supports multimodal sentiment analysis, multimodal emotion recognition, facial expression recognition, emotion reason inference, and emotion cause-pair extraction tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EmoVerse outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results in sentiment and emotion-related tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/liaolea/EmoVerse.
Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) is an emerging research topic that aims to understand and recognize human sentiment or emotions through multiple modalities. However, in real-world dynamic scenarios, the distribution of target data is always changing and different from the source data used to train the model, which leads to performance degradation. Common adaptation methods usually need source data, which could pose privacy issues or storage overheads. Therefore, test-time adaptation (TTA) methods are introduced to improve the performance of the model at inference time. Existing TTA methods are always based on probabilistic models and unimodal learning, and thus can not be applied to MSA which is often considered as a multimodal regression task. In this paper, we propose two strategies: Contrastive Adaptation and Stable Pseudo-label generation (CASP) for test-time adaptation for multimodal sentiment analysis. The two strategies deal with the distribution shifts for MSA by enforcing consistency and minimizing empirical risk, respectively. Extensive experiments show that CASP brings significant and consistent improvements to the performance of the model across various distribution shift settings and with different backbones, demonstrating its effectiveness and versatility. Our codes are available at https://github.com/zrguo/CASP.
In multimodal sentiment analysis, collecting text data is often more challenging than video or audio due to higher annotation costs and inconsistent automatic speech recognition (ASR) quality. To address this challenge, our study has developed a robust model that effectively integrates multimodal sentiment information, even in the absence of text modality. Specifically, we have developed a Double-Flow Self-Distillation Framework, including Unified Modality Cross-Attention (UMCA) and Modality Imagination Autoencoder (MIA), which excels at processing both scenarios with complete modalities and those with missing text modality. In detail, when the text modality is missing, our framework uses the LLM-based model to simulate the text representation from the audio modality, while the MIA module supplements information from the other two modalities to make the simulated text representation similar to the real text representation. To further align the simulated and real representations, and to enable the model to capture the continuous nature of sample orders in sentiment valence regression tasks, we have also introduced the Rank-N Contrast (RNC) loss function. When testing on the CMU-MOSEI, our model achieved outstanding performance on MAE and significantly outperformed other models when text modality is missing. The code is available at: https://github.com/WarmCongee/SDUMC
Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) utilizes multimodal data to infer the users' sentiment. Previous methods focus on equally treating the contribution of each modality or statically using text as the dominant modality to conduct interaction, which neglects the situation where each modality may become dominant. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Guided Dynamic Modality Attention Fusion Framework (KuDA) for multimodal sentiment analysis. KuDA uses sentiment knowledge to guide the model dynamically selecting the dominant modality and adjusting the contributions of each modality. In addition, with the obtained multimodal representation, the model can further highlight the contribution of dominant modality through the correlation evaluation loss. Extensive experiments on four MSA benchmark datasets indicate that KuDA achieves state-of-the-art performance and is able to adapt to different scenarios of dominant modality.
The field of Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) has recently witnessed an emerging direction seeking to tackle the issue of data incompleteness. Recognizing that the language modality typically contains dense sentiment information, we consider it as the dominant modality and present an innovative Language-dominated Noise-resistant Learning Network (LNLN) to achieve robust MSA. The proposed LNLN features a dominant modality correction (DMC) module and dominant modality based multimodal learning (DMML) module, which enhances the model's robustness across various noise scenarios by ensuring the quality of dominant modality representations. Aside from the methodical design, we perform comprehensive experiments under random data missing scenarios, utilizing diverse and meaningful settings on several popular datasets (\textit{e.g.,} MOSI, MOSEI, and SIMS), providing additional uniformity, transparency, and fairness compared to existing evaluations in the literature. Empirically, LNLN consistently outperforms existing baselines, demonstrating superior performance across these challenging and extensive evaluation metrics.
Multimodal affective computing (MAC) has garnered increasing attention due to its broad applications in analyzing human behaviors and intentions, especially in text-dominated multimodal affective computing field. This survey presents the recent trends of multimodal affective computing from NLP perspective through four hot tasks: multimodal sentiment analysis, multimodal emotion recognition in conversation, multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis and multimodal multi-label emotion recognition. The goal of this survey is to explore the current landscape of multimodal affective research, identify development trends, and highlight the similarities and differences across various tasks, offering a comprehensive report on the recent progress in multimodal affective computing from an NLP perspective. This survey covers the formalization of tasks, provides an overview of relevant works, describes benchmark datasets, and details the evaluation metrics for each task. Additionally, it briefly discusses research in multimodal affective computing involving facial expressions, acoustic signals, physiological signals, and emotion causes. Additionally, we discuss the technical approaches, challenges, and future directions in multimodal affective computing. To support further research, we released a repository that compiles related works in multimodal affective computing, providing detailed resources and references for the community.
Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to learn representations from different modalities to identify human emotions. However, existing works often neglect the frame-level redundancy inherent in continuous time series, resulting in incomplete modality representations with noise. To address this issue, we propose temporal-invariant learning for the first time, which constrains the distributional variations over time steps to effectively capture long-term temporal dynamics, thus enhancing the quality of the representations and the robustness of the model. To fully exploit the rich semantic information in textual knowledge, we propose a semantic-guided fusion module. By evaluating the correlations between different modalities, this module facilitates cross-modal interactions gated by modality-invariant representations. Furthermore, we introduce a modality discriminator to disentangle modality-invariant and modality-specific subspaces. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model. Our code is available at https://github.com/X-G-Y/SATI.
Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) leverages multiple data modals to analyze human sentiment. Existing MSA models generally employ cutting-edge multimodal fusion and representation learning-based methods to promote MSA capability. However, there are two key challenges: (i) in existing multimodal fusion methods, the decoupling of modal combinations and tremendous parameter redundancy, lead to insufficient fusion performance and efficiency; (ii) a challenging trade-off exists between representation capability and computational overhead in unimodal feature extractors and encoders. Our proposed GSIFN incorporates two main components to solve these problems: (i) a graph-structured and interlaced-masked multimodal Transformer. It adopts the Interlaced Mask mechanism to construct robust multimodal graph embedding, achieve all-modal-in-one Transformer-based fusion, and greatly reduce the computational overhead; (ii) a self-supervised learning framework with low computational overhead and high performance, which utilizes a parallelized LSTM with matrix memory to enhance non-verbal modal features for unimodal label generation. Evaluated on the MSA datasets CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and CH-SIMS, GSIFN demonstrates superior performance with significantly lower computational overhead compared with previous state-of-the-art models.
Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) has garnered substantial research attention recently. Existing MERC methods face several challenges: (1) they fail to fully harness direct inter-modal cues, possibly leading to less-than-thorough cross-modal modeling; (2) they concurrently extract information from the same and different modalities at each network layer, potentially triggering conflicts from the fusion of multi-source data; (3) they lack the agility required to detect dynamic sentimental changes, perhaps resulting in inaccurate classification of utterances with abrupt sentiment shifts. To address these issues, a novel approach named GraphSmile is proposed for tracking intricate emotional cues in multimodal dialogues. GraphSmile comprises two key components, i.e., GSF and SDP modules. GSF ingeniously leverages graph structures to alternately assimilate inter-modal and intra-modal emotional dependencies layer by layer, adequately capturing cross-modal cues while effectively circumventing fusion conflicts. SDP is an auxiliary task to explicitly delineate the sentiment dynamics between utterances, promoting the model's ability to distinguish sentimental discrepancies. Furthermore, GraphSmile is effortlessly applied to multimodal sentiment analysis in conversation (MSAC), forging a unified multimodal affective model capable of executing MERC and MSAC tasks. Empirical results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that GraphSmile can handle complex emotional and sentimental patterns, significantly outperforming baseline models.
Transparency in AI healthcare decision-making is crucial. By incorporating rationales to explain reason for each predicted label, users could understand Large Language Models (LLMs)'s reasoning to make better decision. In this work, we introduce a new task - Sentiment Reasoning - for both speech and text modalities, and our proposed multimodal multitask framework and the world's largest multimodal sentiment analysis dataset. Sentiment Reasoning is an auxiliary task in sentiment analysis where the model predicts both the sentiment label and generates the rationale behind it based on the input transcript. Our study conducted on both human transcripts and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts shows that Sentiment Reasoning helps improve model transparency by providing rationale for model prediction with quality semantically comparable to humans while also improving model's classification performance (+2% increase in both accuracy and macro-F1) via rationale-augmented fine-tuning. Also, no significant difference in the semantic quality of generated rationales between human and ASR transcripts. All code, data (five languages - Vietnamese, English, Chinese, German, and French) and models are published online: https://github.com/leduckhai/Sentiment-Reasoning
The development of multimodal models has significantly advanced multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion recognition. However, in real-world applications, the presence of various missing modality cases often leads to a degradation in the model's performance. In this work, we propose a novel multimodal Transformer framework using prompt learning to address the issue of missing modalities. Our method introduces three types of prompts: generative prompts, missing-signal prompts, and missing-type prompts. These prompts enable the generation of missing modality features and facilitate the learning of intra- and inter-modality information. Through prompt learning, we achieve a substantial reduction in the number of trainable parameters. Our proposed method outperforms other methods significantly across all evaluation metrics. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method, showcasing its ability to effectively handle missing modalities.
The Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge (MuSe) 2024 addresses two contemporary multimodal affect and sentiment analysis problems: In the Social Perception Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Perception), participants will predict 16 different social attributes of individuals such as assertiveness, dominance, likability, and sincerity based on the provided audio-visual data. The Cross-Cultural Humor Detection Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Humor) dataset expands upon the Passau Spontaneous Football Coach Humor (Passau-SFCH) dataset, focusing on the detection of spontaneous humor in a cross-lingual and cross-cultural setting. The main objective of MuSe 2024 is to unite a broad audience from various research domains, including multimodal sentiment analysis, audio-visual affective computing, continuous signal processing, and natural language processing. By fostering collaboration and exchange among experts in these fields, the MuSe 2024 endeavors to advance the understanding and application of sentiment analysis and affective computing across multiple modalities. This baseline paper provides details on each sub-challenge and its corresponding dataset, extracted features from each data modality, and discusses challenge baselines. For our baseline system, we make use of a range of Transformers and expert-designed features and train Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)-Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models on them, resulting in a competitive baseline system. On the unseen test datasets of the respective sub-challenges, it achieves a mean Pearson's Correlation Coefficient ($\rho$) of 0.3573 for MuSe-Perception and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) value of 0.8682 for MuSe-Humor.
The emergence of multimodal data on social media platforms presents new opportunities to better understand user sentiments toward a given aspect. However, existing multimodal datasets for Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis (ACSA) often focus on textual annotations, neglecting fine-grained information in images. Consequently, these datasets fail to fully exploit the richness inherent in multimodal. To address this, we introduce a new Vietnamese multimodal dataset, named ViMACSA, which consists of 4,876 text-image pairs with 14,618 fine-grained annotations for both text and image in the hotel domain. Additionally, we propose a Fine-Grained Cross-Modal Fusion Framework (FCMF) that effectively learns both intra- and inter-modality interactions and then fuses these information to produce a unified multimodal representation. Experimental results show that our framework outperforms SOTA models on the ViMACSA dataset, achieving the highest F1 score of 79.73%. We also explore characteristics and challenges in Vietnamese multimodal sentiment analysis, including misspellings, abbreviations, and the complexities of the Vietnamese language. This work contributes both a benchmark dataset and a new framework that leverages fine-grained multimodal information to improve multimodal aspect-category sentiment analysis. Our dataset is available for research purposes: https://github.com/hoangquy18/Multimodal-Aspect-Category-Sentiment-Analysis.
In this paper, we propose a new Multimodal Representation Learning (MRL) method for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA), which facilitates the adaptive interaction between modalities through Cooperative Sentiment Agents, named Co-SA. Co-SA comprises two critical components: the Sentiment Agents Establishment (SAE) phase and the Sentiment Agents Cooperation (SAC) phase. During the SAE phase, each sentiment agent deals with an unimodal signal and highlights explicit dynamic sentiment variations within the modality via the Modality-Sentiment Disentanglement (MSD) and Deep Phase Space Reconstruction (DPSR) modules. Subsequently, in the SAC phase, Co-SA meticulously designs task-specific interaction mechanisms for sentiment agents so that coordinating multimodal signals to learn the joint representation. Specifically, Co-SA equips an independent policy model for each sentiment agent that captures significant properties within the modality. These policies are optimized mutually through the unified reward adaptive to downstream tasks. Benefitting from the rewarding mechanism, Co-SA transcends the limitation of pre-defined fusion modes and adaptively captures unimodal properties for MRL in the multimodal interaction setting. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Co-SA, we apply it to address Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) and Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) tasks. Our comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that Co-SA excels at discovering diverse cross-modal features, encompassing both common and complementary aspects. The code can be available at https://github.com/smwanghhh/Co-SA.
Sarcasm Explanation in Dialogue (SED) is a new yet challenging task, which aims to generate a natural language explanation for the given sarcastic dialogue that involves multiple modalities (\ie utterance, video, and audio). Although existing studies have achieved great success based on the generative pretrained language model BART, they overlook exploiting the sentiments residing in the utterance, video and audio, which play important roles in reflecting sarcasm that essentially involves subtle sentiment contrasts. Nevertheless, it is non-trivial to incorporate sentiments for boosting SED performance, due to three main challenges: 1) diverse effects of utterance tokens on sentiments; 2) gap between video-audio sentiment signals and the embedding space of BART; and 3) various relations among utterances, utterance sentiments, and video-audio sentiments. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel sEntiment-enhanceD Graph-based multimodal sarcasm Explanation framework, named EDGE. In particular, we first propose a lexicon-guided utterance sentiment inference module, where a heuristic utterance sentiment refinement strategy is devised. We then develop a module named Joint Cross Attention-based Sentiment Inference (JCA-SI) by extending the multimodal sentiment analysis model JCA to derive the joint sentiment label for each video-audio clip. Thereafter, we devise a context-sentiment graph to comprehensively model the semantic relations among the utterances, utterance sentiments, and video-audio sentiments, to facilitate sarcasm explanation generation. Extensive experiments on the publicly released dataset WITS verify the superiority of our model over cutting-edge methods.