# EII-SCL: Harnessing Emotional Inertia for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17366 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17366/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [DialogueGCN: A Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11540/) (2019)
- [Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Research Challenges, Datasets, and Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02947/) (2019)
- [MMGCN: Multimodal Fusion via Deep Graph Convolution Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06779/) (2021)
- [MM-DFN: Multimodal Dynamic Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02385/) (2022)
- [M2FNet: Multi-modal Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02187/) (2022)
- [A Transformer-Based Model With Self-Distillation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20494/) (2023)
- [Hybrid Curriculum Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11718/) (2021)
- [COLD Fusion: Calibrated and Ordinal Latent Distribution Fusion for Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05833/) (2022)
- [CFN-ESA: A Cross-Modal Fusion Network with Emotion-Shift Awareness for Dialogue Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15432/) (2023)
- [Curriculum Learning Meets Directed Acyclic Graph for Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17269/) (2024)
- [The Emotion is Not One-hot Encoding: Learning with Grayscale Label for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07359/) (2022)
- [UNet-Based Fusion and Exponential Moving Average Adaptation for Noise-Robust Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25624/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Learning to Prefer Reliably: Error-Augmented Emotion Preference Optimization with Calibrated Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24730/) (2026)
- [EmoGavel: Grounding-Aware Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards for Multimodal Emotion Preference Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13353/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) achieves accurate predictions by integrating multimodal and contextual information in dialogues. While current MERC approaches focus on modeling complex contextual dependencies in conversation, they often overlook the impact of contextual emotional inertia in emotion shift, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Emotional Inertia-Informed Supervised Contrastive Learning module (EII-SCL) that informs the contrastive objective by constructing inertia-affected samples within temporal windows, effectively leveraging emotional inertia as a prior while enabling seamless integration with existing MERC models without requiring additional data. Extensive experiments on IEMOCAP and MELD show that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.