Open Access

ARTICLE

RUAL: Uncertainty-Aware Learning for Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Weijun Gao, Ziyang Zhang^*, Maotang Su

School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Lanzhou University of Technology, Lanzhou, China

* Corresponding Author: Ziyang Zhang. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2026, 89(1), 31 https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2026.085382

Received 10 May 2026; Accepted 23 June 2026; Issue published 13 August 2026

Abstract

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) has made significant progress in integrating heterogeneous information from text, speech, and vision. However, real-world multimodal data often suffer from modality noise, semantic inconsistency, and incomplete modality information, which can weaken cross-modal fusion and reduce the reliability of sentiment prediction. To address these challenges, this paper proposes RUAL, a robust uncertainty-aware learning framework for multimodal sentiment analysis. Specifically, RUAL first employs a Gathered Multi-Head Attention Pooling (GMHA) module to aggregate intra-modal features and estimate modality uncertainty based on attention entropy. Then, an Uncertainty-Aware Cross-Modal Coupled Layer (UACCL) is introduced to dynamically regulate cross-modal residual fusion according to sample confidence, thereby reducing the negative influence of unreliable modalities on fused representations. In addition, uncertainty-weighted learning and uncertainty-guided self-distillation (UWL and U-SD) are jointly integrated through an optimization strategy to further improve training stability and generalization in complex scenarios. Experimental results on CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and MVSA-Single demonstrate that RUAL achieves strong overall performance and maintains stable prediction results under missing-modality and Gaussian-noise conditions, validating the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework for multimodal sentiment analysis.

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Keywords

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