# Towards Robust Multimodal Emotion Recognition under Missing Modalities and Distribution Shifts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10452 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10452/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 20 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Multimodal distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/multimodal-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Found in Translation: Learning Robust Joint Representations by Cyclic Translations Between Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07809/) (2018)
- [Words Can Shift: Dynamically Adjusting Word Representations Using Nonverbal Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09362/) (2018)
- [GCNet: Graph Completion Network for Incomplete Multimodal Learning in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02177/) (2022)
- [Decoupled Multimodal Distilling for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13802/) (2023)
- [TransModality: An End2End Fusion Method with Transformer for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02902/) (2020)
- [Tag-assisted Multimodal Sentiment Analysis under Uncertain Missing Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13707/) (2022)
- [Towards Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Debiasing via Bias Purification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05023/) (2024)
- [Towards Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Incomplete Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20012/) (2024)
- [DLF: Disentangled-Language-Focused Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12225/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Prompt Learning with Missing Modalities for Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05374/) (2024)
- [Efficient Multimodal Transformer with Dual-Level Feature Restoration for Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07589/) (2022)
- [Counterfactual Reasoning for Out-of-distribution Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11652/) (2022)
- [General Debiasing for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10511/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Addressing Missing and Noisy Modalities in One Solution: Unified Modality-Quality Framework for Low-quality Multimodal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02695/) (2026)
- [EmoScene: A Dual-space Dataset for Controllable Affective Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00933/) (2026)
- [PMPGuard: Catching Pseudo-Matched Pairs in Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18660/) (2025)
- [TSMD: Temporal-Stream Modality Dropout for Robust Video Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39051/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) face challenges in addressing both modality missing and Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) data simultaneously. Existing methods often rely on specific models or introduce excessive parameters, which limits their practicality. To address these issues, we propose a novel robust MER framework, Causal Inference Distiller (CIDer), and introduce a new task, Random Modality Feature Missing (RMFM), to generalize the definition of modality missing. CIDer integrates two key components: a Model-Specific Self-Distillation (MSSD) module and a Model-Agnostic Causal Inference (MACI) module. MSSD enhances robustness under the RMFM task through a weight-sharing self-distillation approach applied across low-level features, attention maps, and high-level representations. Additionally, a Word-level Self-aligned Attention Module (WSAM) reduces computational complexity, while a Multimodal Composite Transformer (MCT) facilitates efficient multimodal fusion. To tackle OOD challenges, MACI employs a tailored causal graph to mitigate label and language biases using a Multimodal Causal Module (MCM) and fine-grained counterfactual texts. Notably, MACI can independently enhance OOD generalization with minimal additional parameters. Furthermore, we also introduce the new repartitioned MER OOD datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that CIDer achieves robust performance in both RMFM and OOD scenarios, with fewer parameters and faster training compared to state-of-the-art methods. The implementation of this work is publicly accessible at https://github.com/gw-zhong/CIDer.