Modality-Collaborative Transformer with Hybrid Feature Reconstruction for Robust Emotion Recognition

As a vital aspect of affective computing, Multimodal Emotion Recognition has been an active research area in the multimedia community. Despite recent progress, this field still confronts two major challenges in real-world applications: 1) improving the efficiency of constructing joint representations from unaligned multimodal features, and 2) relieving the performance decline caused by random modality feature missing. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, Modality-Collaborative Transformer with Hybrid Feature Reconstruction (MCT-HFR), to address these issues. The crucial component of MCT is a novel attention-based encoder which concurrently extracts and dynamically balances the intra- and inter-modality relations for all associated modalities. With additional modality-wise parameter sharing, a more compact representation can be encoded with less time and space complexity. To improve the robustness of MCT, we further introduce HFR which consists of two modules: Local Feature Imagination (LFI) and Global Feature Alignment (GFA). During model training, LFI leverages complete features as supervisory signals to recover local missing features, while GFA is designed to reduce the global semantic gap between pairwise complete and incomplete representations. Experimental evaluations on two popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms advanced baselines in both complete and incomplete data scenarios.