# To Fuse or to Drop? Dual-Path Learning for Resolving Modality Conflicts in Multimodal Emotion Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04877 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04877/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01783/) (2016)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Multimodal Transformer for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00295/) (2019)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [Tensor Fusion Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07250/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04906/) (2021)
- [SkipNet: Learning Dynamic Routing in Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09485/) (2017)
- [Distilling Knowledge via Knowledge Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09044/) (2021)
- [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)
- [DialogueRNN: An Attentive RNN for Emotion Detection in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00405/) (2018)
- [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)
- [MMGCN: Multimodal Fusion via Deep Graph Convolution Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06779/) (2021)
- [Decoupled Multimodal Distilling for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13802/) (2023)
- [DialogueCRN: Contextual Reasoning Networks for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01978/) (2021)
- [UniMSE: Towards Unified Multimodal Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11256/) (2022)
- [EmoCaps: Emotion Capsule based Model for Conversational Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13504/) (2022)
- [Make Acoustic and Visual Cues Matter: CH-SIMS v2.0 Dataset and AV-Mixup Consistent Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02604/) (2022)
- [A Transformer-Based Model With Self-Distillation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20494/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Multi-modal Conversational Emotion Recognition with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05735/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Multi-loss Fusion Network for Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00264/) (2023)
- [The MuSe 2022 Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge: Humor, Emotional Reactions, and Stress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05691/) (2022)
- [MER 2024: Semi-Supervised Learning, Noise Robustness, and Open-Vocabulary Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17113/) (2024)
- [GraphCFC: A Directed Graph Based Cross-Modal Feature Complementation Approach for Multimodal Conversational Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12261/) (2022)
- [Supervised Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01505/) (2023)
- [Joyful: Joint Modality Fusion and Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11009/) (2023)
- [TelME: Teacher-leading Multimodal Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12987/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal emotion recognition (MER) benefits from combining text, audio, and vision, yet standard fusion often fails when modalities conflict. Crucially, conflicts differ in resolvability: benign conflicts stem from missing, weak, or ambiguous cues and can be mitigated by cross-modal calibration, while severe conflicts arise from intrinsically contradictory (e.g., sarcasm) or misleading signals, for which forced fusion may amplify errors. Recognizing this, we propose Dual-Path Conflict Resolution (DCR), a unified framework that learns when to fuse and when to drop modalities. Path I (Affective Fusion Distiller, AFD) performs reverse distillation from audio/visual teachers to a textual student using temporally weighted class evidence, thereby enhancing representation-level calibration and improving fusion when alignment is beneficial. Path II (Affective Discernment Agent, ADA) formulates MER as a contextual bandit that selects among fusion and unimodal predictions based on a dual-view state and a calibration-aware reward, enabling decision-level arbitration under irreconcilable conflicts without requiring per-modality reliability labels. By taking into account the full multimodal context and coupling soft calibration with hard arbitration, DCR reconciles conflicts that can be aligned while bypassing misleading modalities when fusion is harmful. Across five benchmarks covering both dialogue-level and clip-level MER, DCR consistently outperforms competitive baselines or achieves highly competitive results. Further ablations, conflict-specific subset evaluation, and modality-selection analysis verify that AFD and ADA are complementary and jointly improve robust conflict-aware emotion recognition.