# Improving Multimodal Sentiment Analysis via Modality Optimization and Dynamic Primary Modality Selection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06328 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06328/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Routing Between Capsules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09829/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Transformer for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00295/) (2019)
- [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)
- [MISA: Modality-Invariant and -Specific Representations for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03545/) (2020)
- [MOSI: Multimodal Corpus of Sentiment Intensity and Subjectivity Analysis in Online Opinion Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06259/) (2016)
- [Learning Modality-Specific Representations with Self-Supervised Multi-Task Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04830/) (2021)
- [Memory Fusion Network for Multi-view Sequential Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00927/) (2018)
- [Improving Multimodal Fusion with Hierarchical Mutual Information Maximization for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00412/) (2021)
- [Learning Relationships between Text, Audio, and Video via Deep Canonical Correlation for Multimodal Language Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05544/) (2019)
- [Bi-Bimodal Modality Fusion for Correlation-Controlled Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13669/) (2021)
- [Make Acoustic and Visual Cues Matter: CH-SIMS v2.0 Dataset and AV-Mixup Consistent Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02604/) (2022)
- [ASCD: Attention-Steerable Contrastive Decoding for Reducing Hallucination in MLLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14766/) (2025)
- [Towards Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Debiasing via Bias Purification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05023/) (2024)
- [Robust Emotion Recognition in Context Debiasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05963/) (2024)
- [Text-oriented Modality Reinforcement Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis from Unaligned Multimodal Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13205/) (2023)
- [Asynchronous Multimodal Video Sequence Fusion via Learning Modality-Exclusive and -Agnostic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04955/) (2024)
- [Denoising Bottleneck with Mutual Information Maximization for Video Multimodal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14652/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Resolving Evidence Sparsity: Agentic Context Engineering for Long-Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22850/) (2025)
- [FysicsWorld: A Unified Full-Modality Benchmark for Any-to-Any Understanding, Generation, and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12756/) (2025)
- [ProFocus: Proactive Perception and Focused Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05530/) (2026)
- [AIM-Bench: Benchmarking and Improving Affective Image Manipulation via Fine-Grained Hierarchical Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10454/) (2026)
- [FED-Bench: A Cross-Granular Benchmark for Disentangled Evaluation of Facial Expression Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29697/) (2026)
- [MooD: Perception-Enhanced Efficient Affective Image Editing via Continuous Valence-Arousal Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02521/) (2026)
- [Reliability-aware Cross-sample Enhancement for Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30470/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to predict sentiment from language, acoustic, and visual data in videos. However, imbalanced unimodal performance often leads to suboptimal fused representations. Existing approaches typically adopt fixed primary modality strategies to maximize dominant modality advantages, yet fail to adapt to dynamic variations in modality importance across different samples. Moreover, non-language modalities suffer from sequential redundancy and noise, degrading model performance when they serve as primary inputs. To address these issues, this paper proposes a modality optimization and dynamic primary modality selection framework (MODS). First, a Graph-based Dynamic Sequence Compressor (GDC) is constructed, which employs capsule networks and graph convolution to reduce sequential redundancy in acoustic/visual modalities. Then, we develop a sample-adaptive Primary Modality Selector (MSelector) for dynamic dominance determination. Finally, a Primary-modality-Centric Cross-Attention (PCCA) module is designed to enhance dominant modalities while facilitating cross-modal interaction. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that MODS outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior performance by effectively balancing modality contributions and eliminating redundant noise.