DGC-Net: Cross-Modal Dynamic Routing with Global-Guided Compensation in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

User-generated videos, including opinion vlogs and video reviews, provide a rich source of people's attitudes toward products, services, and social topics. Understanding the sentiment expressed by speakers is important for analyzing online opinions, as transcripts alone may not capture the attitude and intensity conveyed through vocal tone and facial expressions. Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) addresses this need by integrating textual, acoustic, and visual cues. However, these cues are often subtle, noisy, and inconsistent across modalities. Existing local affective cue modeling methods typically operate within individual modalities and overlook global contexts from other modalities. This may cause cross-modal affective cue inconsistency. Hierarchical global-local fusion methods integrate global semantics with fine-grained local affective cues. However, they commonly determine the relative contributions of the two representations implicitly, preventing the global-local contributions from adapting to the sample-dependent reliability of local cues and resulting in either insufficient use of informative local cues or excessive interference from unreliable ones. To address these issues, we propose DGC-Net, a Dynamic Gating and Global-Guided Compensation Network for MSA. DGC-Net mitigates cross-modal affective cue inconsistency through cross-modal contribution-aware dynamic expert routing. This mechanism uses auxiliary global contexts to guide local expert selection. Moreover, global-guided dynamic compensation fusion alleviates sample-dependent global-local contribution imbalance while preserving global semantic as the primary anchor and adaptively incorporating expert-refined local cues. Experiments on five multimodal benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and general applicability of DGC-Net, and ablation studies verify the contribution of each proposed component.