# Bimodal Connection Attention Fusion for Speech Emotion Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05858 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05858/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [M2FNet: Multi-modal Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02187/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Multi-modal Emotion Learning with Broad State Space Models and Probability-guidance Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17858/) (2024)
- [Learning Emotion Representations from Verbal and Nonverbal Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13500/) (2023)
- [A Review on Methods and Applications in Multimodal Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09195/) (2022)
- [COLD Fusion: Calibrated and Ordinal Latent Distribution Fusion for Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05833/) (2022)
- [CFN-ESA: A Cross-Modal Fusion Network with Emotion-Shift Awareness for Dialogue Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15432/) (2023)
- [TelME: Teacher-leading Multimodal Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12987/) (2024)
- [HCAM -- Hierarchical Cross Attention Model for Multi-modal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06910/) (2023)
- [FER-former: Multi-modal Transformer for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12997/) (2023)
- [cross-modal fusion techniques for utterance-level emotion recognition from text and speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02447/) (2023)
- [LineConGraphs: Line Conversation Graphs for Effective Emotion Recognition using Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03756/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-modal emotion recognition is challenging due to the difficulty of extracting features that capture subtle emotional differences. Understanding multi-modal interactions and connections is key to building effective bimodal speech emotion recognition systems. In this work, we propose Bimodal Connection Attention Fusion (BCAF) method, which includes three main modules: the interactive connection network, the bimodal attention network, and the correlative attention network. The interactive connection network uses an encoder-decoder architecture to model modality connections between audio and text while leveraging modality-specific features. The bimodal attention network enhances semantic complementation and exploits intra- and inter-modal interactions. The correlative attention network reduces cross-modal noise and captures correlations between audio and text. Experiments on the MELD and IEMOCAP datasets demonstrate that the proposed BCAF method outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines.