A Unified Framework for Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis via Expert-Guided Multimodal Fusion with Large Language Models

Abstract: Multimodal emotion understanding requires effective integration of text, audio, and visual modalities for both discrete emotion recognition and continuous sentiment analysis. We present EGMF, a unified framework combining expert-guided multimodal fusion with LLMs. Our approach features three specialized expert networks--a fine-grained local expert for subtle emotional nuances, a semantic correlation expert for cross-modal relationships, and a global context expert for long-range dependencies--adaptively integrated through hierarchical dynamic gating for context-aware feature selection. Enhanced multimodal representations are integrated with LLMs via pseudo token injection and prompt-based conditioning, enabling a single generative framework to handle both classification and regression through natural language generation. We employ LoRA fine-tuning for computational efficiency. Experiments on bilingual benchmarks (MELD, CHERMA, MOSEI, SIMS-V2) demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, with superior cross-lingual robustness revealing universal patterns in multimodal emotional expressions across English and Chinese. We will release the source code publicly.