Our senses individually work in a coordinated fashion to express our emotional intentions. In this work, we experiment with modeling modality-specific sensory signals to attend to our latent multimodal emotional intentions and vice versa expressed via low-rank multimodal fusion and multimodal transformers. The low-rank factorization of multimodal fusion amongst the modalities helps represent approximate multiplicative latent signal interactions. Motivated by the work of~\cite{tsai2019MULT} and~\cite{Liu_2018}, we present our transformer-based cross-fusion architecture without any over-parameterization of the model. The low-rank fusion helps represent the latent signal interactions while the modality-specific attention helps focus on relevant parts of the signal. We present two methods for the Multimodal Sentiment and Emotion Recognition results on CMU-MOSEI, CMU-MOSI, and IEMOCAP datasets and show that our models have lesser parameters, train faster and perform comparably to many larger fusion-based architectures.
Compared with unimodal data, multimodal data can provide more features to help the model analyze the sentiment of data. Previous research works rarely consider token-level feature fusion, and few works explore learning the common features related to sentiment in multimodal data to help the model fuse multimodal features. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive Learning and Multi-Layer Fusion (CLMLF) method for multimodal sentiment detection. Specifically, we first encode text and image to obtain hidden representations, and then use a multi-layer fusion module to align and fuse the token-level …
Multimodal sentiment analysis is an important research area that predicts speaker's sentiment tendency through features extracted from textual, visual and acoustic modalities. The central challenge is the fusion method of the multimodal information. A variety of fusion methods have been proposed, but few of them adopt end-to-end translation models to mine the subtle correlation between modalities. Enlightened by recent success of Transformer in the area of machine translation, we propose a new fusion method, TransModality, to address the task of multimodal sentiment analysis. We assume that tr…
Center for Information and Language Processing（信息与语言处理中心）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）
Recent research has made impressive progress in large-scale multimodal pre-training. In the context of the rapid growth of model size, it is necessary to seek efficient and flexible methods other than finetuning. In this paper, we propose to use prompt vectors to align the modalities. Our method achieves comparable performance to several other multimodal fusion methods in low-resource settings. We further show that our method is modular and parameter-efficient for processing tasks involving two or more data modalities.
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Multimodal models have been proven to outperform text-based models on learning semantic word representations. Almost all previous multimodal models typically treat the representations from different modalities equally. However, it is obvious that information from different modalities contributes differently to the meaning of words. This motivates us to build a multimodal model that can dynamically fuse the semantic representations from different modalities according to different types of words. To that end, we propose three novel dynamic fusion methods to assign importance weights to each moda…
Nowadays, with the explosive growth of multimodal reviews on social media platforms, multimodal sentiment analysis has recently gained popularity because of its high relevance to these social media posts. Although most previous studies design various fusion frameworks for learning an interactive representation of multiple modalities, they fail to incorporate sentimental knowledge into inter-modality learning. This paper proposes a Multi-channel Attentive Graph Convolutional Network (MAGCN), consisting of two main components: cross-modality interactive learning and sentimental feature fusion. F…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Bosch Center for AI（博世人工智能中心）
Human language is often multimodal, which comprehends a mixture of natural language, facial gestures, and acoustic behaviors. However, two major challenges in modeling such multimodal human language time-series data exist: 1) inherent data non-alignment due to variable sampling rates for the sequences from each modality; and 2) long-range dependencies between elements across modalities. In this paper, we introduce the Multimodal Transformer (MulT) to generically address the above issues in an end-to-end manner without explicitly aligning the data. At the heart of our model is the directional p…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
In multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA), the performance of a model highly depends on the quality of synthesized embeddings. These embeddings are generated from the upstream process called multimodal fusion, which aims to extract and combine the input unimodal raw data to produce a richer multimodal representation. Previous work either back-propagates the task loss or manipulates the geometric property of feature spaces to produce favorable fusion results, which neglects the preservation of critical task-related information that flows from input to the fusion results. In this work, we propose a…
The lack of data and the difficulty of multimodal fusion have always been challenges for multimodal emotion recognition (MER). In this paper, we propose to use pretrained models as upstream network, wav2vec 2.0 for audio modality and BERT for text modality, and finetune them in downstream task of MER to cope with the lack of data. For the difficulty of multimodal fusion, we use a K-layer multi-head attention mechanism as a downstream fusion module. Starting from the MER task itself, we design two auxiliary tasks to alleviate the insufficient fusion between modalities and guide the network to c…
Instituto Politécnico Nacional（国立理工学院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Multimodal sentiment analysis is a very actively growing field of research. A promising area of opportunity in this field is to improve the multimodal fusion mechanism. We present a novel feature fusion strategy that proceeds in a hierarchical fashion, first fusing the modalities two in two and only then fusing all three modalities. On multimodal sentiment analysis of individual utterances, our strategy outperforms conventional concatenation of features by 1%, which amounts to 5% reduction in error rate. On utterance-level multimodal sentiment analysis of multi-utterance video clips, for which…
A*STAR AI Initiative, Institute of High Performance Computing（A*STAR人工智能计划、高性能计算研究院）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Centro de Investigación en Computación, Instituto Politécnico Nacional（国立理工学院计算研究中心）；SUTD（新加坡科技设计大学）
Multimodal fusion is considered a key step in multimodal tasks such as sentiment analysis, emotion detection, question answering, and others. Most of the recent work on multimodal fusion does not guarantee the fidelity of the multimodal representation with respect to the unimodal representations. In this paper, we propose a variational autoencoder-based approach for modality fusion that minimizes information loss between unimodal and multimodal representations. We empirically show that this method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on several popular datasets.
Computational modeling of human multimodal language is an emerging research area in natural language processing spanning the language, visual and acoustic modalities. Comprehending multimodal language requires modeling not only the interactions within each modality (intra-modal interactions) but more importantly the interactions between modalities (cross-modal interactions). In this paper, we propose the Recurrent Multistage Fusion Network (RMFN) which decomposes the fusion problem into multiple stages, each of them focused on a subset of multimodal signals for specialized, effective fusion. C…
Ping An Life Insurance Company of China, Ltd.（中国平安人寿保险股份有限公司）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）
Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) has considerable prospects for developing empathetic machines. For multimodal ERC, it is vital to understand context and fuse modality information in conversations. Recent graph-based fusion methods generally aggregate multimodal information by exploring unimodal and cross-modal interactions in a graph. However, they accumulate redundant information at each layer, limiting the context understanding between modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel Multimodal Dynamic Fusion Network (MM-DFN) to recognize emotions by fully understanding multimodal co…
Effective fusion of data from multiple modalities, such as video, speech, and text, is challenging due to the heterogeneous nature of multimodal data. In this paper, we propose adaptive fusion techniques that aim to model context from different modalities effectively. Instead of defining a deterministic fusion operation, such as concatenation, for the network, we let the network decide "how" to combine a given set of multimodal features more effectively. We propose two networks: 1) Auto-Fusion, which learns to compress information from different modalities while preserving the context, and 2) …
Multimodal sentiment analysis is an important research task to predict the sentiment score based on the different modality data from a specific opinion video. Many previous pieces of research have proved the significance of utilizing the shared and unique information across different modalities. However, the high-order combined signals from multimodal data would also help extract satisfied representations. In this paper, we propose CMGA, a Cross-Modality Gated Attention fusion model for MSA that tends to make adequate interaction across different modality pairs. CMGA also adds a forget gate to…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
The research and applications of multimodal emotion recognition have become increasingly popular recently. However, multimodal emotion recognition faces the challenge of lack of data. To solve this problem, we propose to use transfer learning which leverages state-of-the-art pre-trained models including wav2vec 2.0 and BERT for this task. Multi-level fusion approaches including coattention-based early fusion and late fusion with the models trained on both embeddings are explored. Also, a multi-granularity framework which extracts not only frame-level speech embeddings but also segment-level em…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；IIIT-Delhi（德里印度理工学院信息技术学院）；Cisco Systems（思科系统公司）；NSUT Delhi（德里内塔吉·苏巴斯科技大学）
Disfluency, though originating from human spoken utterances, is primarily studied as a uni-modal text-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) task. Based on early-fusion and self-attention-based multimodal interaction between text and acoustic modalities, in this paper, we propose a novel multimodal architecture for disfluency detection from individual utterances. Our architecture leverages a multimodal dynamic fusion network that adds minimal parameters over an existing text encoder commonly used in prior art to leverage the prosodic and acoustic cues hidden in speech. Through experiments, we…
Recently multimodal transformer models have gained popularity because their performance on language and vision tasks suggest they learn rich visual-linguistic representations. Focusing on zero-shot image retrieval tasks, we study three important factors which can impact the quality of learned representations: pretraining data, the attention mechanism, and loss functions. By pretraining models on six datasets, we observe that dataset noise and language similarity to our downstream task are important indicators of model performance. Through architectural analysis, we learn that models with a mul…
Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Southwestern University of Finance and Economics（西南财经大学）；Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学）；Tencent（腾讯）
Fusion technique is a key research topic in multimodal sentiment analysis. The recent attention-based fusion demonstrates advances over simple operation-based fusion. However, these fusion works adopt single-scale, i.e., token-level or utterance-level, unimodal representation. Such single-scale fusion is suboptimal because that different modality should be aligned with different granularities. This paper proposes a fusion model named ScaleVLAD to gather multi-Scale representation from text, video, and audio with shared Vectors of Locally Aggregated Descriptors to improve unaligned multimodal s…
With the increasing popularity of video sharing websites such as YouTube and Facebook, multimodal sentiment analysis has received increasing attention from the scientific community. Contrary to previous works in multimodal sentiment analysis which focus on holistic information in speech segments such as bag of words representations and average facial expression intensity, we develop a novel deep architecture for multimodal sentiment analysis that performs modality fusion at the word level. In this paper, we propose the Gated Multimodal Embedding LSTM with Temporal Attention (GME-LSTM(A)) model…
National Technical University of Athens（雅典国立技术大学）；Athena Research Center（雅典娜研究中心）
Multimodal learning pipelines have benefited from the success of pretrained language models. However, this comes at the cost of increased model parameters. In this work, we propose Adapted Multimodal BERT (AMB), a BERT-based architecture for multimodal tasks that uses a combination of adapter modules and intermediate fusion layers. The adapter adjusts the pretrained language model for the task at hand, while the fusion layers perform task-specific, layer-wise fusion of audio-visual information with textual BERT representations. During the adaptation process the pre-trained language model param…
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a crucial component in affective dialogue systems, which helps the system understand users' emotions and generate empathetic responses. However, most works focus on modeling speaker and contextual information primarily on the textual modality or simply leveraging multimodal information through feature concatenation. In order to explore a more effective way of utilizing both multimodal and long-distance contextual information, we propose a new model based on multimodal fused graph convolutional network, MMGCN, in this work. MMGCN can not only make us…
SpeechX Limited（思必驰（深圳）有限公司）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Emotion recognition is a challenging and actively-studied research area that plays a critical role in emotion-aware human-computer interaction systems. In a multimodal setting, temporal alignment between different modalities has not been well investigated yet. This paper presents a new model named as Gated Bidirectional Alignment Network (GBAN), which consists of an attention-based bidirectional alignment network over LSTM hidden states to explicitly capture the alignment relationship between speech and text, and a novel group gated fusion (GGF) layer to integrate the representations of differ…
It is now well established from a variety of studies that there is a significant benefit from combining video and audio data in detecting active speakers. However, either of the modalities can potentially mislead audiovisual fusion by inducing unreliable or deceptive information. This paper outlines active speaker detection as a multi-objective learning problem to leverage best of each modalities using a novel self-attention, uncertainty-based multimodal fusion scheme. Results obtained show that the proposed multi-objective learning architecture outperforms traditional approaches in improving …
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
The complex world around us is inherently multimodal and sequential (continuous). Information is scattered across different modalities and requires multiple continuous sensors to be captured. As machine learning leaps towards better generalization to real world, multimodal sequential learning becomes a fundamental research area. Arguably, modeling arbitrarily distributed spatio-temporal dynamics within and across modalities is the biggest challenge in this research area. In this paper, we present a new transformer model, called the Factorized Multimodal Transformer (FMT) for multimodal sequent…
Anhui University（安徽大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Anhui Medical University（安徽医科大学）
In this paper, we present our solution to the MuSe-Humor sub-challenge of the Multimodal Emotional Challenge (MuSe) 2022. The goal of the MuSe-Humor sub-challenge is to detect humor and calculate AUC from audiovisual recordings of German football Bundesliga press conferences. It is annotated for humor displayed by the coaches. For this sub-challenge, we first build a discriminant model using the transformer module and BiLSTM module, and then propose a hybrid fusion strategy to use the prediction results of each modality to improve the performance of the model. Our experiments demonstrate the e…
