Papers › TelME: Teacher-leading Multimodal Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

TelME: Teacher-leading Multimodal Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

16 Jan 2024arXiv:2401.12987archive 2025-07-28

Taeyang Yun, Hyunkuk Lim, Jeonghwan Lee, Min Song

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) plays a crucial role in enabling dialogue systems to effectively respond to user requests. The emotions in a conversation can be identified by the representations from various modalities, such as audio, visual, and text. However, due to the weak contribution of non-verbal modalities to recognize emotions, multimodal ERC has always been considered a challenging task. In this paper, we propose Teacher-leading Multimodal fusion network for ERC (TelME). TelME incorporates cross-modal knowledge distillation to transfer information from a language model acting as the teacher to the non-verbal students, thereby optimizing the efficacy of the weak modalities. We then combine multimodal features using a shifting fusion approach in which student networks support the teacher. TelME achieves state-of-the-art performance in MELD, a multi-speaker conversation dataset for ERC. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our components through additional experiments.

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yuntaeyang/telme officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

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Tasks

Emotion RecognitionEmotion Recognition in ConversationKnowledge DistillationLanguage ModelingLanguage Modelling

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Emotion Recognition in Conversation IEMOCAP TelME Weighted-F1 70.48 #14 of 59 Archive leaderboard report
Emotion Recognition in Conversation MELD TelME Weighted-F1 67.37 #8 of 68 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Knowledge Distillation

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