Multimodal Emotion Recognition via Bi-directional Cross-Attention and Temporal Modeling

Expression recognition in in-the-wild video data remains challenging due to substantial variations in facial appearance, background conditions, audio noise, and the inherently dynamic nature of human affect. Relying on a single modality, such as facial expressions or speech, is often insufficient for capturing these complex emotional cues. To address this limitation, we propose a multimodal emotion recognition framework for the Expression (EXPR) task in the 10th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) Challenge. Our framework builds on large-scale pre-trained models for visual and audio representation learning and integrates them in a unified multimodal architecture. To better capture temporal patterns in facial expression sequences, we incorporate temporal visual modeling over video windows. We further introduce a bi-directional cross-attention fusion module that enables visual and audio features to interact in a symmetric manner, facilitating cross-modal contextualization and complementary emotion understanding. In addition, we employ a text-guided contrastive objective to encourage semantically meaningful visual representations through alignment with emotion-related text prompts. Experimental results on the ABAW 10th EXPR benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, achieving a Macro F1 score of 0.32 compared to the baseline score of 0.25, and highlight the benefit of combining temporal visual modeling, audio representation learning, and cross-modal fusion for robust emotion recognition in unconstrained real-world environments.