Angle-Optimized Partial Disentanglement for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Che, Xinyi, Wang, Wenbo, Hou, Yuanbo, Xie, Mingjie, Zhao, Qijun, Guan, Jian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914199437836288
author Che, Xinyi
Wang, Wenbo
Hou, Yuanbo
Xie, Mingjie
Zhao, Qijun
Guan, Jian
author_facet Che, Xinyi
Wang, Wenbo
Hou, Yuanbo
Xie, Mingjie
Zhao, Qijun
Guan, Jian
contents Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MERC) aims to enhance emotion understanding by integrating complementary cues from text, audio, and visual modalities. Existing MERC approaches predominantly focus on cross-modal shared features, often overlooking modality-specific features that capture subtle yet critical emotional cues such as micro-expressions, prosodic variations, and sarcasm. Although related work in multimodal emotion recognition (MER) has explored disentangling shared and modality-specific features, these methods typically employ rigid orthogonal constraints to achieve full disentanglement, which neglects the inherent complementarity between feature types and may limit recognition performance. To address these challenges, we propose Angle-Optimized Feature Learning (AO-FL), a framework tailored for MERC that achieves partial disentanglement of shared and specific features within each modality through adaptive angular optimization. Specifically, AO-FL aligns shared features across modalities to ensure semantic consistency, and within each modality it adaptively models the angular relationship between its shared and modality-specific features to preserve both distinctiveness and complementarity. An orthogonal projection refinement further removes redundancy in specific features and enriches shared features with contextual information, yielding more discriminative multimodal representations. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of AO-FL for MERC, demonstrating superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, AO-FL can be seamlessly integrated with various unimodal feature extractors and extended to other multimodal fusion tasks, such as MER, thereby highlighting its strong generalization beyond MERC.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_22447
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Angle-Optimized Partial Disentanglement for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation
Che, Xinyi
Wang, Wenbo
Hou, Yuanbo
Xie, Mingjie
Zhao, Qijun
Guan, Jian
Multimedia
Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MERC) aims to enhance emotion understanding by integrating complementary cues from text, audio, and visual modalities. Existing MERC approaches predominantly focus on cross-modal shared features, often overlooking modality-specific features that capture subtle yet critical emotional cues such as micro-expressions, prosodic variations, and sarcasm. Although related work in multimodal emotion recognition (MER) has explored disentangling shared and modality-specific features, these methods typically employ rigid orthogonal constraints to achieve full disentanglement, which neglects the inherent complementarity between feature types and may limit recognition performance. To address these challenges, we propose Angle-Optimized Feature Learning (AO-FL), a framework tailored for MERC that achieves partial disentanglement of shared and specific features within each modality through adaptive angular optimization. Specifically, AO-FL aligns shared features across modalities to ensure semantic consistency, and within each modality it adaptively models the angular relationship between its shared and modality-specific features to preserve both distinctiveness and complementarity. An orthogonal projection refinement further removes redundancy in specific features and enriches shared features with contextual information, yielding more discriminative multimodal representations. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of AO-FL for MERC, demonstrating superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, AO-FL can be seamlessly integrated with various unimodal feature extractors and extended to other multimodal fusion tasks, such as MER, thereby highlighting its strong generalization beyond MERC.
title Angle-Optimized Partial Disentanglement for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation
topic Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22447