# TACOformer:Token-channel compounded Cross Attention for Multimodal Emotion Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13592 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13592/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [UCTransNet: Rethinking the Skip Connections in U-Net from a Channel-wise Perspective with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04335/) (2021)
- [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, 2 of 2)

- [PhysioSync: Temporal and Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning Inspired by Physiological Synchronization for EEG-Based Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17163/) (2025)
- [Transformer-based EEG Decoding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02320/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, emotion recognition based on physiological signals has emerged as a field with intensive research. The utilization of multi-modal, multi-channel physiological signals has significantly improved the performance of emotion recognition systems, due to their complementarity. However, effectively integrating emotion-related semantic information from different modalities and capturing inter-modal dependencies remains a challenging issue. Many existing multimodal fusion methods ignore either token-to-token or channel-to-channel correlations of multichannel signals from different modalities, which limits the classification capability of the models to some extent. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive perspective of multimodal fusion that integrates channel-level and token-level cross-modal interactions. Specifically, we introduce a unified cross attention module called Token-chAnnel COmpound (TACO) Cross Attention to perform multimodal fusion, which simultaneously models channel-level and token-level dependencies between modalities. Additionally, we propose a 2D position encoding method to preserve information about the spatial distribution of EEG signal channels, then we use two transformer encoders ahead of the fusion module to capture long-term temporal dependencies from the EEG signal and the peripheral physiological signal, respectively. Subject-independent experiments on emotional dataset DEAP and Dreamer demonstrate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance.