Dynamic Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equation Network for Multi-modal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) refers to identifying and classifying human emotional states by combining data from multiple different modalities (e.g., audio, images, text, video, etc.). Most existing multimodal emotion recognition methods use GCN to improve performance, but existing GCN methods are prone to overfitting and cannot capture the temporal dependency of the speaker's emotions. To address the above problems, we propose a Dynamic Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equation Network (DGODE) for MERC, which combines the dynamic changes of emotions to capture the temporal dependency of speakers' emotions, and effectively alleviates the overfitting problem of GCNs. Technically, the key idea of DGODE is to utilize an adaptive mixhop mechanism to improve the generalization ability of GCNs and use the graph ODE evolution network to characterize the continuous dynamics of node representations over time and capture temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments on two publicly available multimodal emotion recognition datasets demonstrate that the proposed DGODE model has superior performance compared to various baselines. Furthermore, the proposed DGODE can also alleviate the over-smoothing problem, thereby enabling the construction of a deep GCN network.

SDR-GNN: Spectral Domain Reconstruction Graph Neural Network for Incomplete Multimodal Learning in Conversational Emotion Recognition

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (MERC) aims to classify utterance emotions using textual, auditory, and visual modal features. Most existing MERC methods assume each utterance has complete modalities, overlooking the common issue of incomplete modalities in real-world scenarios. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved notable results in Incomplete Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (IMERC). However, traditional GNNs focus on binary relationships between nodes, limiting their ability to capture more complex, higher-order information. Moreover, repeated message passing can cause over-smoothing, reducing their capacity to preserve essential high-frequency details. To address these issues, we propose a Spectral Domain Reconstruction Graph Neural Network (SDR-GNN) for incomplete multimodal learning in conversational emotion recognition. SDR-GNN constructs an utterance semantic interaction graph using a sliding window based on both speaker and context relationships to model emotional dependencies. To capture higher-order and high-frequency information, SDR-GNN utilizes weighted relationship aggregation, ensuring consistent semantic feature extraction across utterances. Additionally, it performs multi-frequency aggregation in the spectral domain, enabling efficient recovery of incomplete modalities by extracting both high- and low-frequency information. Finally, multi-head attention is applied to fuse and optimize features for emotion recognition. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach is effective in incomplete multimodal learning and outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.

Contrastive Multi-graph Learning with Neighbor Hierarchical Sifting for Semi-supervised Text Classification

Graph contrastive learning has been successfully applied in text classification due to its remarkable ability for self-supervised node representation learning. However, explicit graph augmentations may lead to a loss of semantics in the contrastive views. Secondly, existing methods tend to overlook edge features and the varying significance of node features during multi-graph learning. Moreover, the contrastive loss suffer from false negatives. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method of contrastive multi-graph learning with neighbor hierarchical sifting for semi-supervised text classification, namely ConNHS. Specifically, we exploit core features to form a multi-relational text graph, enhancing semantic connections among texts. By separating text graphs, we provide diverse views for contrastive learning. Our approach ensures optimal preservation of the graph information, minimizing data loss and distortion. Then, we separately execute relation-aware propagation and cross-graph attention propagation, which effectively leverages the varying correlations between nodes and edge features while harmonising the information fusion across graphs. Subsequently, we present the neighbor hierarchical sifting loss (NHS) to refine the negative selection. For one thing, following the homophily assumption, NHS masks first-order neighbors of the anchor and positives from being negatives. For another, NHS excludes the high-order neighbors analogous to the anchor based on their similarities. Consequently, it effectively reduces the occurrence of false negatives, preventing the expansion of the distance between similar samples in the embedding space. Our experiments on ThuCNews, SogouNews, 20 Newsgroups, and Ohsumed datasets achieved 95.86\%, 97.52\%, 87.43\%, and 70.65\%, which demonstrates competitive results in semi-supervised text classification.

SEG:Seeds-Enhanced Iterative Refinement Graph Neural Network for Entity Alignment

Entity alignment is crucial for merging knowledge across knowledge graphs, as it matches entities with identical semantics. The standard method matches these entities based on their embedding similarities using semi-supervised learning. However, diverse data sources lead to non-isomorphic neighborhood structures for aligned entities, complicating alignment, especially for less common and sparsely connected entities. This paper presents a soft label propagation framework that integrates multi-source data and iterative seed enhancement, addressing scalability challenges in handling extensive datasets where scale computing excels. The framework uses seeds for anchoring and selects optimal relationship pairs to create soft labels rich in neighborhood features and semantic relationship data. A bidirectional weighted joint loss function is implemented, which reduces the distance between positive samples and differentially processes negative samples, taking into account the non-isomorphic neighborhood structures. Our method outperforms existing semi-supervised approaches, as evidenced by superior results on multiple datasets, significantly improving the quality of entity alignment.

MCSFF: Multi-modal Consistency and Specificity Fusion Framework for Entity Alignment

Multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) is essential for enhancing knowledge graphs and improving information retrieval and question-answering systems. Existing methods often focus on integrating modalities through their complementarity but overlook the specificity of each modality, which can obscure crucial features and reduce alignment accuracy. To solve this, we propose the Multi-modal Consistency and Specificity Fusion Framework (MCSFF), which innovatively integrates both complementary and specific aspects of modalities. We utilize Scale Computing's hyper-converged infrastructure to optimize IT management and resource allocation in large-scale data processing. Our framework first computes similarity matrices for each modality using modality embeddings to preserve their unique characteristics. Then, an iterative update method denoises and enhances modality features to fully express critical information. Finally, we integrate the updated information from all modalities to create enriched and precise entity representations. Experiments show our method outperforms current state-of-the-art MMEA baselines on the MMKG dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness and practical potential.

Graph Contrastive Learning via Cluster-refined Negative Sampling for Semi-supervised Text Classification

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has been widely applied to text classification tasks due to its ability to generate self-supervised signals from unlabeled data, thus facilitating model training. However, existing GCL-based text classification methods often suffer from negative sampling bias, where similar nodes are incorrectly paired as negative pairs. This can lead to over-clustering, where instances of the same class are divided into different clusters. To address the over-clustering issue, we propose an innovative GCL-based method of graph contrastive learning via cluster-refined negative sampling for semi-supervised text classification, namely ClusterText. Firstly, we combine the pre-trained model Bert with graph neural networks to learn text representations. Secondly, we introduce a clustering refinement strategy, which clusters the learned text representations to obtain pseudo labels. For each text node, its negative sample set is drawn from different clusters. Additionally, we propose a self-correction mechanism to mitigate the loss of true negative samples caused by clustering inconsistency. By calculating the Euclidean distance between each text node and other nodes within the same cluster, distant nodes are still selected as negative samples. Our proposed ClusterText demonstrates good scalable computing, as it can effectively extract important information from from a large amount of data. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of ClusterText in text classification tasks.

Masked Graph Learning with Recurrent Alignment for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Since Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MERC) can be applied to public opinion monitoring, intelligent dialogue robots, and other fields, it has received extensive research attention in recent years. Unlike traditional unimodal emotion recognition, MERC can fuse complementary semantic information between multiple modalities (e.g., text, audio, and vision) to improve emotion recognition. However, previous work ignored the inter-modal alignment process and the intra-modal noise information before multimodal fusion but directly fuses multimodal features, which will hinder the model for representation learning. In this study, we have developed a novel approach called Masked Graph Learning with Recursive Alignment (MGLRA) to tackle this problem, which uses a recurrent iterative module with memory to align multimodal features, and then uses the masked GCN for multimodal feature fusion. First, we employ LSTM to capture contextual information and use a graph attention-filtering mechanism to eliminate noise effectively within the modality. Second, we build a recurrent iteration module with a memory function, which can use communication between different modalities to eliminate the gap between modalities and achieve the preliminary alignment of features between modalities. Then, a cross-modal multi-head attention mechanism is introduced to achieve feature alignment between modalities and construct a masked GCN for multimodal feature fusion, which can perform random mask reconstruction on the nodes in the graph to obtain better node feature representation. Finally, we utilize a multilayer perceptron (MLP) for emotion recognition. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (i.e., IEMOCAP and MELD) demonstrate that {MGLRA} outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

A Multi-view Mask Contrastive Learning Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Age Estimation

The age estimation task aims to use facial features to predict the age of people and is widely used in public security, marketing, identification, and other fields. However, the features are mainly concentrated in facial keypoints, and existing CNN and Transformer-based methods have inflexibility and redundancy for modeling complex irregular structures. Therefore, this paper proposes a Multi-view Mask Contrastive Learning Graph Convolutional Neural Network (MMCL-GCN) for age estimation. Specifically, the overall structure of the MMCL-GCN network contains a feature extraction stage and an age estimation stage. In the feature extraction stage, we introduce a graph structure to construct face images as input and then design a Multi-view Mask Contrastive Learning (MMCL) mechanism to learn complex structural and semantic information about face images. The learning mechanism employs an asymmetric siamese network architecture, which utilizes an online encoder-decoder structure to reconstruct the missing information from the original graph and utilizes the target encoder to learn latent representations for contrastive learning. Furthermore, to promote the two learning mechanisms better compatible and complementary, we adopt two augmentation strategies and optimize the joint losses. In the age estimation stage, we design a Multi-layer Extreme Learning Machine (ML-IELM) with identity mapping to fully use the features extracted by the online encoder. Then, a classifier and a regressor were constructed based on ML-IELM, which were used to identify the age grouping interval and accurately estimate the final age. Extensive experiments show that MMCL-GCN can effectively reduce the error of age estimation on benchmark datasets such as Adience, MORPH-II, and LAP-2016.

Efficient Long-distance Latent Relation-aware Graph Neural Network for Multi-modal Emotion Recognition in Conversations

The task of multi-modal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) aims to analyze the genuine emotional state of each utterance based on the multi-modal information in the conversation, which is crucial for conversation understanding. Existing methods focus on using graph neural networks (GNN) to model conversational relationships and capture contextual latent semantic relationships. However, due to the complexity of GNN, existing methods cannot efficiently capture the potential dependencies between long-distance utterances, which limits the performance of MERC. In this paper, we propose an Efficient Long-distance Latent Relation-aware Graph Neural Network (ELR-GNN) for multi-modal emotion recognition in conversations. Specifically, we first use pre-extracted text, video and audio features as input to Bi-LSTM to capture contextual semantic information and obtain low-level utterance features. Then, we use low-level utterance features to construct a conversational emotion interaction graph. To efficiently capture the potential dependencies between long-distance utterances, we use the dilated generalized forward push algorithm to precompute the emotional propagation between global utterances and design an emotional relation-aware operator to capture the potential semantic associations between different utterances. Furthermore, we combine early fusion and adaptive late fusion mechanisms to fuse latent dependency information between speaker relationship information and context. Finally, we obtain high-level discourse features and feed them into MLP for emotion prediction. Extensive experimental results show that ELR-GNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets IEMOCAP and MELD, with running times reduced by 52\% and 35\%, respectively.

Multi-Stage Balanced Distillation: Addressing Long-Tail Challenges in Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced various natural language processing tasks, but deploying them remains computationally expensive. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising solution, enabling the transfer of capabilities from larger teacher LLMs to more compact student models. Particularly, sequence-level KD, which distills rationale-based reasoning processes instead of merely final outcomes, shows great potential in enhancing students' reasoning capabilities. However, current methods struggle with sequence level KD under long-tailed data distributions, adversely affecting generalization on sparsely represented domains. We introduce the Multi-Stage Balanced Distillation (BalDistill) framework, which iteratively balances training data within a fixed computational budget. By dynamically selecting representative head domain examples and synthesizing tail domain examples, BalDistill achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-tailed datasets, enhancing both the efficiency and efficacy of the distilled models.