Altering Query Prompting With Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Intent Recognition

Multimodal intent recognition utilizes heterogeneous modalities such as visual, auditory, and textual cues to infer user intent, serving as a pivotal component in human-machine interaction. Existing approaches, however, often rely on unimodal paradigms or shallow multimodal fusion, failing to model cross-modal semantic dependencies and struggling to extract discriminative features from non-verbal modalities, limiting their robustness in complex scenarios. To mitigate these limitations, we propose an Altering Query Prompting with Contrastive Learning framework (AQP-CL) that dynamically aligns and refines multimodal representations. Specifically, the Altering Query Prompting (AQP) module introduces a tri-modality rotation attention mechanism, where textual, visual, and acoustic modalities cyclically alternate as queries in cross-attention operations. This approach addresses modality bias while strengthening interdependencies between modalities, ultimately yielding intent-aware fused feature representations that preserve discriminative cues. The Label-semantic Augmented Contrastive Learning (LACL) strategy generates augmented samples through the intent-aware query prompt and enhances feature discrimination via NT-Xent loss on label tokens. By integrating high-confidence textual semantics from intent labels, LACL refines auxiliary modality features through contrastive alignment, ensuring robust cross-modal representation learning. Evaluations on IEMOCAP and MIntRec validate AQP-CL’s superiority, achieving state-of-the-art precision of 77.78% on IEMOCAP, a 3.41% improvement over existing methods.