MAVEN: Multi-Modal Attention for Valence-Arousal Emotion Network

Dynamic emotion recognition in the wild remains challenging due to the transient nature of emotional expressions and temporal misalignment of multi-modal cues. Traditional approaches predict valence and arousal and often overlook the inherent correlation between these two dimensions. The proposed Multi-modal Attention for Valence-Arousal Emotion Network (MAVEN) integrates visual, audio, and textual modalities through a bi-directional cross-modal attention mechanism. MAVEN uses modality-specific encoders to extract features from synchronized video frames, audio segments, and transcripts, predicting emotions in polar coordinates following Russell's circumplex model. The evaluation of the Aff-Wild2 dataset using MAVEN achieved a concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) of 0.3061, surpassing the ResNet-50 baseline model with a CCC of 0.22. The multistage architecture captures the subtle and transient nature of emotional expressions in conversational videos and improves emotion recognition in real-world situations.