# Supervised Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.01505 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01505/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Training for Free!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12843/) (2019)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Training Methods for Semi-Supervised Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07725/) (2016)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning for Pre-trained Language Model Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01403/) (2020)
- [FreeLB: Enhanced Adversarial Training for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11764/) (2019)
- [SMART: Robust and Efficient Fine-Tuning for Pre-trained Natural Language Models through Principled Regularized Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03437/) (2019)
- [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)
- [You Only Propagate Once: Accelerating Adversarial Training via Maximal Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00877/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Robustness through Local Linearization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02610/) (2019)
- [Robust Pre-Training by Adversarial Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13337/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07589/) (2020)
- [COSMIC: COmmonSense knowledge for eMotion Identification in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02795/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning based Hybrid Networks for Long-Tailed Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14267/) (2021)
- [Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Research Challenges, Datasets, and Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02947/) (2019)
- [Emotion Detection on TV Show Transcripts with Sequence-based Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04299/) (2017)
- [MMGCN: Multimodal Fusion via Deep Graph Convolution Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06779/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [DialogueLLM: Context and Emotion Knowledge-Tuned Large Language Models for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11374/) (2023)
- [TelME: Teacher-leading Multimodal Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12987/) (2024)
- [InstructERC: Reforming Emotion Recognition in Conversation with Multi-task Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11911/) (2023)
- [Tracing Intricate Cues in Dialogue: Joint Graph Structure and Sentiment Dynamics for Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21536/) (2024)
- [OmniVox: Zero-Shot Emotion Recognition with Omni-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21480/) (2025)
- [TiCAL:Typicality-Based Consistency-Aware Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15085/) (2025)
- [Structured Probabilistic Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13933/) (2023)
- [Emotion-Anchored Contrastive Learning Framework for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20289/) (2024)
- [Samsung Research China-Beijing at SemEval-2024 Task 3: A multi-stage framework for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16905/) (2024)
- [Representation Learning with Conditional Information Flow Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05510/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis in Multi-Party Conversation Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06805/) (2025)
- [A Heterogeneous Multimodal Graph Learning Framework for Recognizing User Emotions in Social Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07746/) (2025)
- [A Mixture-of-Experts Model for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23300/) (2026)
- [SentiXRL: An advanced large language Model Framework for Multilingual Fine-Grained Emotion Classification in Complex Text Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18162/) (2024)
- [Sync-TVA: A Graph-Attention Framework for Multimodal Emotion Recognition with Cross-Modal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21395/) (2025)
- [Emotion Transfer with Enhanced Prototype for Unseen Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19533/) (2025)
- [An Information-theoretic Propagation Denoising and Fusion Framework for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02259/) (2026)
- [To Fuse or to Drop? Dual-Path Learning for Resolving Modality Conflicts in Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04877/) (2026)
- [Evaluating multimodal emotion recognition in proactive conversational agents: A user study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20200/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Extracting generalized and robust representations is a major challenge in emotion recognition in conversations (ERC). To address this, we propose a supervised adversarial contrastive learning (SACL) framework for learning class-spread structured representations in a supervised manner. SACL applies contrast-aware adversarial training to generate worst-case samples and uses joint class-spread contrastive learning to extract structured representations. It can effectively utilize label-level feature consistency and retain fine-grained intra-class features. To avoid the negative impact of adversarial perturbations on context-dependent data, we design a contextual adversarial training (CAT) strategy to learn more diverse features from context and enhance the model's context robustness. Under the framework with CAT, we develop a sequence-based SACL-LSTM to learn label-consistent and context-robust features for ERC. Experiments on three datasets show that SACL-LSTM achieves state-of-the-art performance on ERC. Extended experiments prove the effectiveness of SACL and CAT.