To Fuse or to Drop? Dual-Path Learning for Resolving Modality Conflicts in Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Multimodal emotion recognition (MER) benefits from combining text, audio, and vision, yet standard fusion often fails when modalities conflict. Crucially, conflicts differ in resolvability: benign conflicts stem from missing, weak, or ambiguous cues and can be mitigated by cross-modal calibration, while severe conflicts arise from intrinsically contradictory (e.g., sarcasm) or misleading signals, for which forced fusion may amplify errors. Recognizing this, we propose Dual-Path Conflict Resolution (DCR), a unified framework that learns when to fuse and when to drop modalities. Path I (Affective Fusion Distiller, AFD) performs reverse distillation from audio/visual teachers to a textual st...
| Authors | Yangchen Yu, Qian Chen, Jia Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.MM |
| Published | 6 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 May 2026 |
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