Expert-Guided Multimodal Fusion for Unified Emotion and Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Multimodal emotion understanding requires the integration of heterogeneous data sources, including text, audio, and visual modalities, while simultaneously addressing discrete emotion recognition and continuous sentiment analysis. We propose EGMF, a unified framework that combines expert-guided multimodal fusion with large language models to achieve superior performance across both tasks. At the core of our framework is a multi-scale expert network, comprising a local expert for capturing subtle emotional nuances, a semantic correlation expert for modeling cross-modal relationships, and a global context expert for understanding long-range dependencies. These experts are adaptively integrated via hierarchical dynamic gating, enabling context-aware feature selection and modality weighting. The enhanced multimodal representations are seamlessly incorporated into the language model through pseudo token injection and prompt-based conditioning, allowing a single generative framework to handle both classification and regression tasks. We employ parameter-efficient LoRA fine-tuning to maintain computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on bilingual benchmark datasets (MELD, CHERMA, MOSEI, SIMS-V2) demonstrate that EGMF outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, cross-lingual robustness, and the discovery of universal patterns in multimodal emotional expressions.

14 pages, 6 figures