MicroEmo: Time-Sensitive Multimodal Emotion Recognition with Micro-Expression Dynamics in Video Dialogues

Abstract: Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal emotion recognition capabilities, integrating multimodal cues from visual, acoustic, and linguistic contexts in the video to recognize human emotional states. However, existing methods ignore capturing local facial features of temporal dynamics of micro-expressions and do not leverage the contextual dependencies of the utterance-aware temporal segments in the video, thereby limiting their expected effectiveness to a certain extent. In this work, we propose MicroEmo, a time-sensitive MLLM aimed at directing attention to the local facial micro-expression dynamics and the contextual dependencies of utterance-aware video clips. Our model incorporates two key architectural contributions: (1) a global-local attention visual encoder that integrates global frame-level timestamp-bound image features with local facial features of temporal dynamics of micro-expressions; (2) an utterance-aware video Q-Former that captures multi-scale and contextual dependencies by generating visual token sequences for each utterance segment and for the entire video then combining them. Preliminary qualitative experiments demonstrate that in a new Explainable Multimodal Emotion Recognition (EMER) task that exploits multi-modal and multi-faceted clues to predict emotions in an open-vocabulary (OV) manner, MicroEmo demonstrates its effectiveness compared with the latest methods.