# Team RAS in 11th ABAW Competition: Multimodal Ambivalence Recognition Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14702 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14702/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2026.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [BAH Dataset for Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition in Videos for Digital Behavioural Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19328/) (2025)
- [Conflict-Aware Multimodal Fusion for Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15818/) (2026)
- [BROTHER: Behavioral Recognition Optimized Through Heterogeneous Ensemble Regularization for Ambivalence and Hesitancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14361/) (2026)
- [Semantic Matters: Multimodal Features for Affective Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11460/) (2025)
- [Discriminative Flow Matching Via Local Generative Predictors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13928/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic recognition of ambivalence and hesitancy is challenging because these states may be expressed through inconsistent linguistic, acoustic, facial, and contextual patterns, while top-performing systems often rely on computationally expensive ensembles. We present a single text-centered multimodal approach for video-level ambivalence and hesitancy recognition for the 11th Affective & Behavior Analysis in-the-Wild (ABAW) Challenge. The proposed approach combines linguistic, acoustic, facial, and scene features using text-centered multimodal fusion model. Text Residual Fusion treats text as the anchor modality and applies gated residual adjustments based on the other modalities. Experiments on the Behavioural Ambivalence/Hesitancy (BAH) corpus confirm that text is the strongest unimodal modality. The Text Residual Fusion model achieves an average Macro F1-score (MF1) of 75.14% across the Development and Public Test subsets. On the Private Test subset, it reaches an MF1 of 78.24%, outperforming the text model by 4.03%. These results demonstrate that complementary multimodal information can improve recognition performance without requiring a large model ensemble.
