A Versatile Multimodal Learning Framework for Zero-Shot Emotion Recognition

Multi-modal Emotion Recognition (MER) aims to identify various human emotions from heterogeneous modalities. With the development of emotional theories, there are more and more novel and fine-grained concepts to describe human emotional feelings. Real-world recognition systems often encounter unseen emotion labels. To address this challenge, we propose a versatile zero-shot MER framework to refine emotion label embeddings for capturing inter-label relationships and improving discrimination between labels. We integrate prior knowledge into a novel affective graph space that generates tailored label embeddings capturing inter-label relationships. To obtain multimodal representations, we disentangle the features of each modality into egocentric and altruistic components using adversarial learning. These components are then hierarchically fused using a hybrid co-attention mechanism. Furthermore, an emotion-guided decoder exploits label-modal dependencies to generate adaptive multimodal representations guided by emotion embeddings. We conduct extensive experiments with different multimodal combinations, including visual-acoustic and visual-textual inputs, on four datasets in both single-label and multi-label zero-shot settings. Results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods.