MART: Masked Affective RepresenTation Learning via Masked Temporal Distribution Distillation

Limited training data is a long-standing problem for video emotion analysis (VEA). Existing works leverage the power of large-scale image datasets for transferring while failing to extract the temporal correlation of affective cues in the video. Inspired by psychology research and empirical theory, we verify that the degree of emotion may vary in different segments of the video, thus introducing the sentiment complementary and emotion intrinsic among temporal segments. We propose an MAE-style method for learning robust affective representation of videos via masking, termed MART. First, we extract the affective cues of the lexicon and verify the extracted one by computing its matching score with video content, in terms of sentiment and emotion scores alongside the temporal dimension. Then, with the verified cues, we propose masked affective modeling to recover temporal emotion distribution. We present temporal affective complementary learning that pulls the complementary part and pushes the intrinsic one of masked multimodal features, where the constraint is set with cross-modal attention among features to mask the video and recover the degree of emotion among segments. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show the superiority of our method in video sentiment analysis, video emotion recognition, multimodal sentiment analysis, and multimodal emotion recognition.