Sync-TVA: A Graph-Attention Framework for Multimodal Emotion Recognition with Cross-Modal Fusion

Abstract

Multimodal emotion recognition (MER) is crucial for enabling emotionally intelligent systems that perceive and respond to human emotions. However, existing methods suffer from limited cross-modal interaction and imbalanced contributions across modalities. To address these issues, we propose Sync-TVA, an end-to-end graph-attention framework featuring modality-specific dynamic enhancement and structured cross-modal fusion. Our design incorporates a dynamic enhancement module for each modality and constructs heterogeneous cross-modal graphs to model semantic relations across text, audio, and visual features. A cross-attention fusion mechanism further aligns multimodal cues for robust emotion inference. Experiments on MELD and IEMOCAP demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art models in both accuracy and weighted F1 score, especially under class-imbalanced conditions.