Vandana Rajan*¹ , Alessio Brutti² , Andrea Cavallaro^1
1 Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom
² Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy
*[email protected]

Humans express their emotions via facial expressions, voice intonation and word choices. To infer the nature of the underlying emotion, recognition models may use a single modality, such as vision, audio, and text, or a combination of modalities. Generally, models that fuse complementary information from multiple modalities outperform their uni-modal counterparts. However, a successful model that fuses modalities requires components that can effectively aggregate task-relevant information from each modality. As crossmodal attention is seen as an effective mechanism for multi-modal fusion, in this paper we quantify the gain that such a mechanism brings compared to the corresponding self-attention mechanism. To this end, we implement and compare a cross-attention and a selfattention model. In addition to attention, each model uses convolutional layers for local feature extraction and recurrent layers for global sequential modelling. We compare the models using different modality combinations for a 7-class emotion classification task using the IEMOCAP dataset. Experimental results indicate that albeit both models improve upon the state-of-the-art in terms of weighted and unweighted accuracy for tri- and bi-modal configurations, their performance is generally statistically comparable. The paper has been accepted in ICASSP 2022.

To download the pre-processed IEMOCAP dataset, use the link given in https://github.com/david-yoon/attentive-modality-hopping-for-SER Once you have it downloaded, replace the 'data_path' in 'multi_run.sh' with your folder path.

Use the bash file 'multi_run.sh' to run the 5 fold cross validation with 10 runs on each fold. Remember to do 'chmod +x ./multi_run.sh' before executing the bash file.

If you use the sample code or part of it in your research, please cite the following:

@ARTICLE{Cross_Self_Attn_Rajan_Cavallaro_2022,
       author = {{Rajan}, V. and {Cavallaro}, A.},
        title = "{Is cross-attention preferable to self-attention for multi-modal emotion recognition?}",
      journal = {International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing},
         year = 2022,
        month = May,
}