# ML-SAN: Multi-Level Speaker-Adaptive Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25383 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25383/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [DialogueRNN: An Attentive RNN for Emotion Detection in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00405/) (2018)
- [DialogueGCN: A Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11540/) (2019)
- [MMGCN: Multimodal Fusion via Deep Graph Convolution Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06779/) (2021)
- [UniMSE: Towards Unified Multimodal Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11256/) (2022)
- [Sound Adversarial Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10910/) (2022)
- [COGMEN: COntextualized GNN based Multimodal Emotion recognitioN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02455/) (2022)
- [Audio-Guided Dynamic Modality Fusion with Stereo-Aware Attention for Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16924/) (2025)
- [Advancing Audio-Visual Navigation Through Multi-Agent Collaboration in 3D Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22698/) (2025)
- [Iterative Residual Cross-Attention Mechanism: An Integrated Approach for Audio-Visual Navigation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25652/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Multi-Target Fusion for Efficient Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21377/) (2025)
- [BSS-CFFMA: Cross-Domain Feature Fusion and Multi-Attention Speech Enhancement Network based on Self-Supervised Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06851/) (2024)
- [VNet: A GAN-based Multi-Tier Discriminator Network for Speech Synthesis Vocoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06906/) (2024)
- [Modality-Invariant Bidirectional Temporal Representation Distillation Network for Missing Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05474/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To establish empathy with machines, it is essential to fully understand human emotional changes. However, research in multimodal emotion recognition often overlooks one problem: individual expressive traits vary significantly, which means that different people may express emotions differently. In our daily lives, we can see this. When communicating with different people, some express "happiness" through their facial expressions and words, while others may hide their happiness or express it through their actions. Both are expressions of 'happiness,' but such differences in emotional expression are still too difficult for machines to distinguish. Current emotion recognition remains at a 'static' level, using a single recognition model to identify all emotional styles. This "simplification" often affects the recognition results, especially in multi-turn dialogues. To address this problem, this paper introduces a novel Multi-Level Speaker Adaptive Network (ML-SAN), which, specifically, effectively addresses the challenge of speaker identity information confusion. ML-SAN does not simply assign a speaker's ID after recognition; instead, it employs a three-stage adaptive process: First, Input-level Calibration uses Feature-Level Linear Modulation (FiLM) to adjust the raw audio and visual features into a neutral space unrelated to the speaker. Then, Interaction-level Gating re-adjusts the trust level for each modality (e.g., voice or facial features) based on the speaker's identity information. Finally, Output-level Regularization maintains the consistency of speaker features in the latent space. Tests on the MELD and IEMOCAP datasets show that our model (ML-SAN) achieves better results, performs exceptionally well in handling challenging tail sentiment categories, and better addresses the diversity of speakers in real-world scenarios.