BiCFlow-MER: Orchestrating Discriminative and Generative Multimodal Emotion Recognition via Conditional Transport

Yanbing Wang, Shenyue Wang, Chunyang Yu

In multimodal emotion recognition (MER), human affective states are inferred by integrating complementary cues from multiple modalities. In audio-text MER, affective cues are often entangled with speaker style and lexical content, while cross-modal disagreement further complicates how the evidence should be integrated. Under conventional discriminative fusion, multimodal evidence is compressed into a terminal prediction, with modality-specific cues and conflict information insufficiently preserved. In large generative affective models, by contrast, affective reasoning is typically embedded in language decoding, leaving emotion evidence implicit and difficult to verify in a structured space. To address these limitations, BiCFlow-MER (Bidirectional Conditional Flow for Multimodal Emotion Recognition) is proposed as a conditional-flow framework in which audio-text MER is formulated as generative evidence transport within a structured emotion space. Within BiCFlow-MER, emotion-oriented evidence is disentangled from speaker-style and lexical-content factors to construct a conflict-aware affective condition. Guided by this condition, each utterance is transported to an explicit…