MIA-Net: Multi-Modal Interactive Attention Network for Multi-Modal Affective Analysis

When a multi-modal affective analysis model generalizes from a bimodal task to a trimodal or multi-modal task, it is usually transformed into a hierarchical fusion model based on every two pairwise modalities, similar to a binary tree structure. This easily leads to large growth in model parameters and computation as the number of modalities increases, which limits the model's generalization. Moreover, many multi-modal fusion methods ignore that different modalities contribute differently to affective analysis. To tackle these challenges, this article proposes a general multi-modal fusion model that supports trimodal or multi-modal affective analysis tasks, called Multi-modal Interactive Attention Network (MIA-Net). Instead of treating different modalities equally, MIA-Net takes the modality that contributes the most to emotion as the main modality and the others as auxiliary modalities. MIA-Net introduces multi-modal interactive attention modules to adaptively select the important information of each auxiliary modality one by one to improve the main-modal representation. Moreover, MIA-Net enables quick generalization to trimodal or multi-modal tasks through stacking multiple MIA modules, which maintains efficient training and only requires linear computation and stable parameter counts. Experimental results of the transfer, generalization, and efficiency experiments on the widely-used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method.