Reliability-Aware Multimodal Sentiment Prediction Under Local Modality Missingness

Multimodal sentiment models are usually evaluated on complete utterances, yet streams often lose a contiguous span of text, audio, or video. We study local missingness on aligned CMU-MOSEI features. Our reliability-aware network (RM-Net) keeps the original temporal positions, represents unobserved positions with a learned token, outputs bounded per-modality intensity contributions gated by observation quality, and is trained with dual-view masking of contiguous segments. We fuse five RM-Net seeds with a LoRA-adapted BERT text expert, using a fusion weight that depends only on the visible fraction of content tokens. Architecture, checkpoint, and fusion choices were made on the validation split. On the held-out split, the fused model reaches a macro-F1 of 0.655 on clean inputs and 0.634 under 40% mixed missingness; its two-view average exceeds the auxiliary-head baseline by 0.024 (95% video-cluster bootstrap interval [0.003, 0.045]). Because this split was inspected during development, these numbers are not a blind test. For explanations, exact Shapley attributions over the eight modality subsets and position-level occlusion show that top-ranked positions reduce the predicted-class probability faster than random positions (AUC gap 0.113 on validation). We also describe an auditable word-level alignment pipeline for raw clips; its outputs do not feed the predictive models.