# Dual-Scale State-Space Modeling with Speaker-Wise Dynamic CRF for Speech Emotion Recognition in Conversation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22399 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22399/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [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)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Emotion Recognition from Speech Using Wav2vec 2.0 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03502/) (2021)
- [Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Research Challenges, Datasets, and Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02947/) (2019)
- [DialogXL: All-in-One XLNet for Multi-Party Conversation Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08695/) (2020)
- [Speech Emotion Recognition with Co-Attention based Multi-level Acoustic Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15326/) (2022)
- [Temporal Modeling Matters: A Novel Temporal Emotional Modeling Approach for Speech Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08233/) (2022)
- [SpeechFormer++: A Hierarchical Efficient Framework for Paralinguistic Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14638/) (2023)
- [Vesper: A Compact and Effective Pretrained Model for Speech Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10757/) (2023)
- [DST: Deformable Speech Transformer for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13729/) (2023)
- [DWFormer: Dynamic Window transFormer for Speech Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01694/) (2023)
- [SCoPE: Shift-Aware Speaker-Conditioned Priors for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20445/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conversational speech emotion recognition must reconcile acoustic evidence across temporal scales with two interaction processes: cross-speaker contextual influence and within-speaker emotion evolution. We propose DSSM-CRF, an audio-only architecture that explicitly separates these processes. Bidirectional state-space models encode fused self-supervised speech representations at frame and dialogue scales, so each utterance representation captures local prosody and context from all speakers. The decoder then orders each speaker's utterances into an independent dynamic conditional random field chain. Consecutive utterances in a speaker's chain form a transition pair whose score combines a corpus-level transition matrix with a residual predicted from the two contextualized utterances. An auxiliary objective supervises whether each pair changes emotion but does not participate in Viterbi inference. Thus, interlocutor turns affect contextual emotion scores without being treated as transitions in another speaker's emotion trajectory. DSSM-CRF achieves 75.81% UA and 74.90% WA on IEMOCAP, and 54.72% WA and 49.31% WF1 on MELD. Matched controls demonstrate complementary gains from speaker-wise factorization and CRF modeling.
