# MM-DFN: Multimodal Dynamic Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02385 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02385/

## Key facts

- Cited by 52 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Simple and Deep Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02133/) (2020)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [Tensor Fusion Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07250/) (2017)
- [Efficient Low-rank Multimodal Fusion with Modality-Specific Factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00064/) (2018)
- [DialogueRNN: An Attentive RNN for Emotion Detection in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00405/) (2018)
- [DialogueGCN: A Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11540/) (2019)
- [Memory Fusion Network for Multi-view Sequential Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00927/) (2018)
- [MMGCN: Multimodal Fusion via Deep Graph Convolution Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06779/) (2021)
- [DialogueCRN: Contextual Reasoning Networks for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01978/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [UniMSE: Towards Unified Multimodal Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11256/) (2022)
- [A Transformer-Based Model With Self-Distillation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20494/) (2023)
- [A Low-rank Matching Attention based Cross-modal Feature Fusion Method for Conversational Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17799/) (2023)
- [MIntRec2.0: A Large-scale Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal Intent Recognition and Out-of-scope Detection in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10943/) (2024)
- [Supervised Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01505/) (2023)
- [Modeling Multimodal Social Interactions: New Challenges and Baselines with Densely Aligned Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02090/) (2024)
- [SpeechFormer++: A Hierarchical Efficient Framework for Paralinguistic Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14638/) (2023)
- [CFN-ESA: A Cross-Modal Fusion Network with Emotion-Shift Awareness for Dialogue Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15432/) (2023)
- [Joyful: Joint Modality Fusion and Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11009/) (2023)
- [Deep Emotion Recognition in Textual Conversations: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09172/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Disentanglement and Fusion on Modality and Context in Conversational Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04502/) (2023)
- [PanoSent: A Panoptic Sextuple Extraction Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09481/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Multimodal Affective Computing: An NLP Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07388/) (2024)
- [TelME: Teacher-leading Multimodal Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12987/) (2024)
- [Can Large Language Models Help Multimodal Language Analysis? MMLA: A Comprehensive Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16427/) (2025)
- [UniMEEC: Towards Unified Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Emotion Cause](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00403/) (2024)
- [Tracing Intricate Cues in Dialogue: Joint Graph Structure and Sentiment Dynamics for Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21536/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Prompt Transformer with Hybrid Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04456/) (2023)
- [Unimodal-driven Distillation in Multimodal Emotion Recognition with Dynamic Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23721/) (2025)
- [Whose Emotion Matters? Speaking Activity Localisation without Prior Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15377/) (2022)
- [Structured Probabilistic Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13933/) (2023)
- [EmoVerse: Exploring Multimodal Large Language Models for Sentiment and Emotion Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08049/) (2024)
- [VISTANet: VIsual Spoken Textual Additive Net for Interpretable Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11450/) (2022)
- [ESIHGNN: Event-State Interactions Infused Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Conversational Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03960/) (2024)
- [Effective Context Modeling Framework for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16444/) (2024)
- [Can Large Language Models Generate Effective Datasets for Emotion Recognition in Conversations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05474/) (2025)
- [EEG-Based Multimodal Learning via Hyperbolic Mixture-of-Curvature Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12579/) (2026)
- [EII-SCL: Harnessing Emotional Inertia for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17366/) (2026)
- [Balancing Task-invariant Interaction and Task-specific Adaptation for Unified Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05164/) (2025)
- [Grounding Emotion Recognition with Visual Prototypes: VEGA -- Revisiting CLIP in MERC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06564/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 conversational context. Specifically, we design a new graph-based dynamic fusion module to fuse multimodal contextual features in a conversation. The module reduces redundancy and enhances complementarity between modalities by capturing the dynamics of contextual information in different semantic spaces. Extensive experiments on two public benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of MM-DFN.