A Conflict-Aware Penalty and Statistical Loss Framework for Balancing Modalities and Enhancing Stability in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) fuses text, acoustic, and visual streams to infer sentiment. Because pre-trained text encoders are far more expressive than their acoustic and visual counterparts, the text modality tends to dominate optimization, suppressing weaker modalities and inducing gradient norm conflicts that destabilize training. To address this, we propose a Conflict-aware Penalty (CP) that detects and penalizes gradient norm conflicts at each training step, and a Statistical Loss (SL) that aligns predicted distribution statistics with empirical input statistics. Crucially, CP prevents dominant modality gradients from interfering with the SL objective, enabling synergistic training within a unified framework incorporating adaptive modality encoding, gated cross-modal fusion, and unimodal auxiliary heads. Experiments on CMU-MOSI demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with ablation studies confirming the effectiveness of each component.