# Modality Disentangled Learning for Incomplete Multimodal Emotion Recognition: A Primitive Memory Distillation Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30563 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30563/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Transformer for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00295/) (2019)
- [Tensor Fusion Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07250/) (2017)
- [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)
- [MOSI: Multimodal Corpus of Sentiment Intensity and Subjectivity Analysis in Online Opinion Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06259/) (2016)
- [Memory Fusion Network for Multi-view Sequential Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00927/) (2018)
- [Found in Translation: Learning Robust Joint Representations by Cyclic Translations Between Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07809/) (2018)
- [Improving Multimodal Fusion with Hierarchical Mutual Information Maximization for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00412/) (2021)
- [GCNet: Graph Completion Network for Incomplete Multimodal Learning in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02177/) (2022)
- [DrFuse: Learning Disentangled Representation for Clinical Multi-Modal Fusion with Missing Modality and Modal Inconsistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06197/) (2024)
- [Modality to Modality Translation: An Adversarial Representation Learning and Graph Fusion Network for Multimodal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07848/) (2019)
- [From Agent Traces to Trust: A Survey of Evidence Tracing and Execution Provenance in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04990/) (2026)
- [Correlation-Decoupled Knowledge Distillation for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Incomplete Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16456/) (2024)
- [Learning Language-guided Adaptive Hyper-modality Representation for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05804/) (2023)
- [Towards Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Incomplete Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20012/) (2024)
- [DecAlign: Hierarchical Cross-Modal Alignment for Decoupled Multimodal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11892/) (2025)
- [Exploiting modality-invariant feature for robust multimodal emotion recognition with missing modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15359/) (2022)
- [Toward Robust Incomplete Multimodal Sentiment Analysis via Hierarchical Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02793/) (2024)
- [Relevant Is Not Warranted: Evidence-Force Calibration for Cited RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28044/) (2026)
- [Multimodal and Multi-view Models for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10198/) (2019)
- [DeepResearch-Slice: Bridging the Retrieval-Utilization Gap via Explicit Text Slicing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03261/) (2025)
- [WorldCoder-Bench: Benchmarking Physically Grounded 3D World Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01869/) (2026)
- [MAP-Graph: Provenance-Aware Shared Memory for Multi-Agent Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10509/) (2026)
- [M2R2: Missing-Modality Robust emotion Recognition framework with iterative data augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02524/) (2022)
- [From Faulty Memories to Corrected Actions: Dependency-Guided Rollback Repair for Memory-Augmented Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10502/) (2026)
- [Do MLLMs Really Understand Space? A Mathematical Reasoning Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11635/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Conditional Rank Allocation for Taxonomy-Aware Medical Language Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06765/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) systems often suffer from missing modalities in real-world scenarios. Existing methods usually generate, align, or distill missing modalities as a whole, overlooking the heterogeneous nature of the information carried by each modality. Such holistic treatment mixes inferable shared semantics with uncertain modality-specific details, yielding unstable representations and degrading robustness. To address this issue, we propose the Primitive Memory Distillation (PriMD) framework. Unlike existing methods, PriMD takes an intra-modal perspective and focuses on how different types of information within a modality differ in recoverability within each modality. PriMD first disentangles cross-modal shared semantics from modality-specific representations, and then discretizes the latter into learnable semantic primitives to construct modality-specific memory banks. When modalities are missing, PriMD is a teacher-student framework that the student model uses the shared semantics of available modalities as queries to dynamically retrieve primitives. It compensates for missing modality-specific information within a constrained memory space and aligns with the teacher model. Extensive experiments on IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSI, and CMU-MOSEI demonstrate that PriMD achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently stronger robustness across a wide range of missing-modality settings, while mitigating the instability caused by holistic feature inference. Our code and project website are available at https://github.com/JiaqiZhang-Sengoku/PriMD and https://jiaqizhang-sengoku.github.io/PriMD/, respectively.