Building Robust Multimodal Sentiment Recognition via a Simple yet Effective Multimodal Transformer

In this paper, we present the solutions to the MER-MULTI and MER-NOISE sub-challenges of the Multimodal Emotion Recognition Challenge (MER 2023). For the tasks MER-MULTI and MERNOISE, participants are required to recognize both discrete and dimensional emotions. Particularly, in MER-NOISE, the test videos are corrupted with noise, necessitating the consideration of modality robustness. Our empirical findings indicate that different modalities contribute differently to the tasks, with a significant impact from the audio and visual modalities, while the text modality plays a weaker role in emotion prediction. To facilitate subsequent multimodal fusion, and considering that language information is implicitly embedded in large pre-trained speech models, we have made the deliberate choice to abandon the text modality and solely utilize visual and acoustic modalities for these sub-challenges. To address the potential underfitting of individual modalities during multimodal training, we propose to jointly train all modalities via a weighted blending of supervision signals. Furthermore, to enhance the robustness of our model, we employ a range of data augmentation techniques at the image level, waveform level, and spectrogram level. Experimental results show that our model ranks 1st in both MER-MULTI (0.7005) and MER-NOISE (0.6846) subchallenges, validating the effectiveness of our method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/dingchaoyue/MultimodalEmotion- Recognition-MER- and- MuSe- 2023- Challenges.