AF-MAT: Aspect-aware Flip-and-Fuse xLSTM for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a crucial NLP task that extracts fine-grained opinions and sentiments from text, such as product reviews and customer feedback. Existing methods often trade off efficiency for performance: traditional LSTM or RNN models struggle to capture long-range dependencies, transformer-based methods are computationally costly, and Mamba-based approaches rely on CUDA and weaken local dependency modeling. The recently proposed Extended Long Short-Term Memory (xLSTM) model offers a promising alternative by effectively capturing long-range dependencies through exponential gating and enhanced memory variants, sLSTM for modeling local dependencies, and mLSTM for scalable, parallelizable memory. However, xLSTM's application in ABSA remains unexplored. To address this, we introduce Aspect-aware Flip-and-Fuse xLSTM (AF-MAT), a framework that leverages xLSTM's strengths. AF-MAT features an Aspect-aware matrix LSTM (AA-mLSTM) mechanism that introduces a dedicated aspect gate, enabling the model to selectively emphasize tokens semantically relevant to the target aspect during memory updates. To model multi-scale context, we incorporate a FlipMix block that sequentially applies a partially flipped Conv1D (pf-Conv1D) to capture short-range dependencies in reverse order, followed by a fully flipped mLSTM (ff-mLSTM) to model long-range dependencies via full sequence reversal. Additionally, we propose MC2F, a lightweight Multihead Cross-Feature Fusion based on mLSTM gating, which dynamically fuses AA-mLSTM outputs (queries and keys) with FlipMix outputs (values) for adaptive representation integration. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that AF-MAT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving higher accuracy in ABSA tasks.