# Conflict-Aware Multimodal Fusion for Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15818 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15818/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2026.

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

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00547/) (2020)
- [GPT-4V with Emotion: A Zero-shot Benchmark for Generalized Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04293/) (2023)
- [A Joint Cross-Attention Model for Audio-Visual Fusion in Dimensional Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14779/) (2022)
- [Video-FocalNets: Spatio-Temporal Focal Modulation for Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06947/) (2023)
- [BAH Dataset for Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition in Videos for Digital Behavioural Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19328/) (2025)
- [Improved Multimodal Fusion for Small Datasets with Auxiliary Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00379/) (2023)
- [Semantic Matters: Multimodal Features for Affective Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11460/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [From Affect to Complex Behavior: Advancing Multimodal Human-Centered AI at the 10th ABAW Workshop & Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27451/) (2026)
- [Simple Features and Honest Calibration for Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11120/) (2026)
- [HSEmotion Team at the 11th ABAW Challenge: Multi-Task Learning and Ambivalence/Hesitancy Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12774/) (2026)
- [HEDGE: A Calibrated Ensemble for A/H Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12176/) (2026)
- [AffectFlow-DINO: Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Task Affect Estimation via Conditional Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13250/) (2026)
- [Audio-Text Cross-Attention with Psycholinguistic Support Features for Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13345/) (2026)
- [CF-Net: Conflict Fusion with Speaker Normalisation and Certainty Weighting for Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13976/) (2026)
- [Team RAS in 11th ABAW Competition: Multimodal Ambivalence Recognition Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14702/) (2026)
- [Multimodal Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition via Cross-Attention and Gated Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15779/) (2026)
- [CALM-AH: An ABAW11-Calibrated Multimodal Ensemble with Reliability-Gated Multi-Expert Consensus for Video-Level Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29310/) (2026)
- [Modality Discrepancy Transformer for Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19148/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) are subtle affective states where a person shows conflicting signals through different channels -- saying one thing while their face or voice tells another story. Recognising these states automatically is valuable in clinical settings, but it is hard for machines because the key evidence lives in the disagreements between what is said, how it sounds, and what the face shows. We present ConflictAwareAH, a multimodal framework built for this problem. Three pre-trained encoders extract video, audio, and text representations. Pairwise conflict features -- element-wise absolute differences between modality embeddings -- serve as bidirectional cues: large cross-modal differences flag A/H, while small differences confirm behavioural consistency and anchor the negative class. This conflict-aware design addresses a key limitation of text-dominant approaches, which tend to over-detect A/H (high F1-AH) while struggling to confirm its absence: our multimodal model improves F1-NoAH by +4.6 points over text alone and halves the class-performance gap. A complementary text-guided late fusion strategy blends a text-only auxiliary head with the full model at inference, adding +4.1 Macro F1. On the BAH dataset from the ABAW10 Ambivalence/Hesitancy Challenge, our method reaches 0.694 Macro F1 on the labelled test split and 0.715 on the private leaderboard, outperforming published multimodal baselines by over 10 points -- all on a single GPU in under 25 minutes of training.