# Federated Dialogue-Semantic Diffusion for Emotion Recognition under Incomplete Modalities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00344 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00344/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [MISA: Modality-Invariant and -Specific Representations for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03545/) (2020)
- [On Deep Multi-View Representation Learning: Objectives and Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01024/) (2016)
- [Emotion-LLaMA: Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Reasoning with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11161/) (2024)
- [GCNet: Graph Completion Network for Incomplete Multimodal Learning in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02177/) (2022)
- [Modality Distillation with Multiple Stream Networks for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07110/) (2018)
- [Learning Relationships between Text, Audio, and Video via Deep Canonical Correlation for Multimodal Language Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05544/) (2019)
- [DialogLM: Pre-trained Model for Long Dialogue Understanding and Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02492/) (2021)
- [Deep Partial Multi-View Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06170/) (2020)
- [MMANet: Margin-aware Distillation and Modality-aware Regularization for Incomplete Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08028/) (2023)
- [A Transformer-Based Model With Self-Distillation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20494/) (2023)
- [FedDiff: Diffusion Model Driven Federated Learning for Multi-Modal and Multi-Clients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02433/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Prototype based Multimodal Federated Learning under Severely Missing Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13898/) (2024)
- [SDR-GNN: Spectral Domain Reconstruction Graph Neural Network for Incomplete Multimodal Learning in Conversational Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19822/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (MERC) enhances emotional understanding through the fusion of multimodal signals. However, unpredictable modality absence in real-world scenarios significantly degrades the performance of existing methods. Conventional missing-modality recovery approaches, which depend on training with complete multimodal data, often suffer from semantic distortion under extreme data distributions, such as fixed-modality absence. To address this, we propose the Federated Dialogue-guided and Semantic-Consistent Diffusion (FedDISC) framework, pioneering the integration of federated learning into missing-modality recovery. By federated aggregation of modality-specific diffusion models trained on clients and broadcasting them to clients missing corresponding modalities, FedDISC overcomes single-client reliance on modality completeness. Additionally, the DISC-Diffusion module ensures consistency in context, speaker identity, and semantics between recovered and available modalities, using a Dialogue Graph Network to capture conversational dependencies and a Semantic Conditioning Network to enforce semantic alignment. We further introduce a novel Alternating Frozen Aggregation strategy, which cyclically freezes recovery and classifier modules to facilitate collaborative optimization. Extensive experiments on the IEMOCAP, CMUMOSI, and CMUMOSEI datasets demonstrate that FedDISC achieves superior emotion classification performance across diverse missing modality patterns, outperforming existing approaches.