Anchoring Emotions in Text: Robust Multimodal Fusion for Mimicry Intensity Estimation

Estimating Emotional Mimicry Intensity (EMI) in naturalistic environments is a critical yet challenging task in affective computing. The primary difficulty lies in effectively modeling the complex, nonlinear temporal dynamics across highly heterogeneous modalities, especially when physical signals are corrupted or missing. To tackle this, we propose TAEMI (Text-Anchored Emotional Mimicry Intensity estimation), a novel multimodal framework designed for the 10th ABAW Competition. Motivated by the observation that continuous visual and acoustic signals are highly susceptible to transient environmental noise, we break the traditional symmetric fusion paradigm. Instead, we leverage textual transcript--which inherently encode a stable, time-independent semantic prior--as central anchors. Specifically, we introduce a Text-Anchored Dual Cross-Attention mechanism that utilizes these robust textual queries to actively filter out frame-level redundancies and align the noisy physical streams. Furthermore, to prevent catastrophic performance degradation caused by inevitably missing data in unconstrained real-world scenarios, we integrate Learnable Missing-Modality Tokens and a Modality Dropout strategy during training. Extensive experiments on the Hume-Vidmimic2 dataset demonstrate that TAEMI effectively captures fine-grained emotional variations and maintains robust predictive resilience under imperfect conditions. Our framework achieves a state-of-the-art mean Pearson correlation coefficient across six continuous emotional dimensions, significantly outperforming existing baseline methods.

Hierarchical Granularity Alignment and State Space Modeling for Robust Multimodal AU Detection in the Wild

Facial Action Unit (AU) detection in in-the-wild environments remains a formidable challenge due to severe spatial-temporal heterogeneity, unconstrained poses, and complex audio-visual dependencies. While recent multimodal approaches have made progress, they often rely on capacity-limited encoders and shallow fusion mechanisms that fail to capture fine-grained semantic shifts and ultra-long temporal contexts. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel multimodal framework driven by Hierarchical Granularity Alignment and State Space Models.Specifically, we leverage powerful foundation models, namely DINOv2 and WavLM, to extract robust and high-fidelity visual and audio representations, effectively replacing traditional feature extractors. To handle extreme facial variations, our Hierarchical Granularity Alignment module dynamically aligns global facial semantics with fine-grained local active patches. Furthermore, we overcome the receptive field limitations of conventional temporal convolutional networks by introducing a Vision-Mamba architecture. This approach enables temporal modeling with O(N) linear complexity, effectively capturing ultra-long-range dynamics without performance degradation. A novel asymmetric cross-attention mechanism is also introduced to deeply synchronize paralinguistic audio cues with subtle visual movements.Extensive experiments on the challenging Aff-Wild2 dataset demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Notably, this framework secured top rankings in the AU Detection track of the 10th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild Competition.

Solution to the 10th ABAW Expression Recognition Challenge: A Robust Multimodal Framework with Safe Cross-Attention and Modality Dropout

Emotion recognition in real-world environments is hindered by partial occlusions, missing modalities, and severe class imbalance. To address these issues, particularly for the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) Expression challenge, we propose a multimodal framework that dynamically fuses visual and audio representations. Our approach uses a dual-branch Transformer architecture featuring a safe cross-attention mechanism and a modality dropout strategy. This design allows the network to rely on audio-based predictions when visual cues are absent. To mitigate the long-tail distribution of the Aff-Wild2 dataset, we apply focal loss optimization, combined with a sliding-window soft voting strategy to capture dynamic emotional transitions and reduce frame-level classification jitter. Experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively handles missing modalities and complex spatiotemporal dependencies, achieving an accuracy of 60.79% and an F1-score of 0.5029 on the Aff-Wild2 validation set.