Conflict-Aware Multimodal Fusion for Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Bekhouche, Salah Eddine, Telli, Hichem, Benlamoudi, Azeddine, Herrouz, Salah Eddine, Taleb-Ahmed, Abdelmalik, Hadid, Abdenour
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866914399710609408
author Bekhouche, Salah Eddine
Telli, Hichem
Benlamoudi, Azeddine
Herrouz, Salah Eddine
Taleb-Ahmed, Abdelmalik
Hadid, Abdenour
author_facet Bekhouche, Salah Eddine
Telli, Hichem
Benlamoudi, Azeddine
Herrouz, Salah Eddine
Taleb-Ahmed, Abdelmalik
Hadid, Abdenour
contents Ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) are subtle affective states where a person shows conflicting signals through different channels -- saying one thing while their face or voice tells another story. Recognising these states automatically is valuable in clinical settings, but it is hard for machines because the key evidence lives in the \emph{disagreements} between what is said, how it sounds, and what the face shows. We present \textbf{ConflictAwareAH}, a multimodal framework built for this problem. Three pre-trained encoders extract video, audio, and text representations. Pairwise conflict features -- element-wise absolute differences between modality embeddings -- serve as \emph{bidirectional} cues: large cross-modal differences flag A/H, while small differences confirm behavioural consistency and anchor the negative class. This conflict-aware design addresses a key limitation of text-dominant approaches, which tend to over-detect A/H (high F1-AH) while struggling to confirm its absence: our multimodal model improves F1-NoAH by +4.6 points over text alone and halves the class-performance gap. A complementary \emph{text-guided late fusion} strategy blends a text-only auxiliary head with the full model at inference, adding +4.1 Macro F1. On the BAH dataset from the ABAW10 Ambivalence/Hesitancy Challenge, our method reaches \textbf{0.694 Macro F1} on the labelled test split and \textbf{0.715} on the private leaderboard, outperforming published multimodal baselines by over 10 points -- all on a single GPU in under 25 minutes of training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_15818
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Conflict-Aware Multimodal Fusion for Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition
Bekhouche, Salah Eddine
Telli, Hichem
Benlamoudi, Azeddine
Herrouz, Salah Eddine
Taleb-Ahmed, Abdelmalik
Hadid, Abdenour
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) are subtle affective states where a person shows conflicting signals through different channels -- saying one thing while their face or voice tells another story. Recognising these states automatically is valuable in clinical settings, but it is hard for machines because the key evidence lives in the \emph{disagreements} between what is said, how it sounds, and what the face shows. We present \textbf{ConflictAwareAH}, a multimodal framework built for this problem. Three pre-trained encoders extract video, audio, and text representations. Pairwise conflict features -- element-wise absolute differences between modality embeddings -- serve as \emph{bidirectional} cues: large cross-modal differences flag A/H, while small differences confirm behavioural consistency and anchor the negative class. This conflict-aware design addresses a key limitation of text-dominant approaches, which tend to over-detect A/H (high F1-AH) while struggling to confirm its absence: our multimodal model improves F1-NoAH by +4.6 points over text alone and halves the class-performance gap. A complementary \emph{text-guided late fusion} strategy blends a text-only auxiliary head with the full model at inference, adding +4.1 Macro F1. On the BAH dataset from the ABAW10 Ambivalence/Hesitancy Challenge, our method reaches \textbf{0.694 Macro F1} on the labelled test split and \textbf{0.715} on the private leaderboard, outperforming published multimodal baselines by over 10 points -- all on a single GPU in under 25 minutes of training.
title Conflict-Aware Multimodal Fusion for Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15818