Modality-Invariant Bidirectional Temporal Representation Distillation Network for Missing Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) integrates diverse modalities—text, audio, and video—to comprehensively analyze and understand individuals’ emotional states. However, the real-world prevalence of incomplete data poses significant challenges to MSA, mainly due to the randomness of modality missing. Moreover, the heterogeneity issue in multimodal data has yet to be effectively addressed. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Modality-Invariant Bidirectional Temporal Representation Distillation Network (MITR-DNet) for Missing Multimodal Sentiment Analysis. MITR-DNet employs a distillation approach, wherein a complete modality teacher model guides a missing modality student model, ensuring robustness in the presence of modality missing. Simultaneously, we developed the Modality-Invariant Bidirectional Temporal Representation Learning Module (MIB-TRL) to mitigate heterogeneity.