Advanced Algorithms in Multimodal Affective Computing

A special issue of Mathematics (ISSN 2227-7390). This special issue belongs to the section "E1: Mathematics and Computer Science".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2026 | Viewed by 699

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
School of Computer Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China
Interests: multimodal affective computing, large language model, sentiment analysis, AI for science

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues, 

The field of Multimodal Affective Computing (MAC) has experienced significant growth, driven by the increasing need to understand and interpret human emotions across various modalities such as speech, text, facial expressions, and physiological signals. As we advance towards more sophisticated computational models, the development of advanced algorithms becomes paramount to enhance the accuracy, reliability, and applicability of MAC systems. This Special Issue, titled “Advanced Algorithms in Multimodal Affective Computing,” aims to bring together the latest research findings, innovative methodologies, and practical applications that push the boundaries of MAC. 

In this context, the Special Issue will focus on the theoretical and practical aspects of developing advanced algorithms for MAC, including, but not limited to, the following: 

  • Novel algorithms for emotion recognition and sentiment analysis that leverage multimodal data;
  • Integration of large language models, machine learning,and deep learning techniques to improve the performance of MAC systems;
  • Exploration of attention mechanisms, transfer learning, and meta-learning in the context of MAC;
  • Development of robust and interpretable models that can generalize across different datasets and real-world scenarios;Sentiment Analysis Across Modalities
  • Applications of advanced algorithms in diverse domains such as healthcare, education, human–computerinteraction, and customer service;
  • Addressing challenges related to data scarcity, noise, and variability in multimodal datasets;
  • Innovations in feature extraction and fusion strategies for multimodal data;
  • Evaluation methodologies and benchmark datasets for assessing the performance of MAC algorithms;
  • Ethical considerations and privacy issues in the development and deployment of MAC systems.

Prof. Dr. Sijie Mai
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • emotion recognition
  • multimodal learning
  • affective computing
  • deep learning for affect analysis
  • sentiment analysis across modalities
  • machine learning in human–computer interaction
  • emotion understanding systems
  • data fusion in affective computing
  • real-time emotion inference
  • ethical ai in emotional intelligence

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 13660 KB  
Article
CA-GFNet: A Cross-Modal Adaptive Gated Fusion Network for Facial Emotion Recognition
by Sitara Afzal and Jong-Ha Lee
Mathematics 2026, 14(6), 1068; https://doi.org/10.3390/math14061068 - 21 Mar 2026
Viewed by 371
Abstract
Facial emotion recognition (FER) plays an important role in healthcare, human–computer interaction, and intelligent security systems. However, despite recent advances, many state-of-the-art FER methods depend on computationally intensive CNN or transformer backbones and large-scale annotated datasets while suffering noticeable performance degradation under cross-dataset [...] Read more.
Facial emotion recognition (FER) plays an important role in healthcare, human–computer interaction, and intelligent security systems. However, despite recent advances, many state-of-the-art FER methods depend on computationally intensive CNN or transformer backbones and large-scale annotated datasets while suffering noticeable performance degradation under cross-dataset evaluation because of domain shift. These limitations hinder practical usage in resource-constrained and real-world environments. To address this issue, we propose Cross-Adaptive Gated Fusion Network (CA-GFNet), a lightweight dual-stream FER framework that explicitly combines shallow structural features with deep semantic representations. The proposed architecture integrates domain-robust gradient-based descriptors with compact deep features extracted from a VGG-based backbone. After face detection and normalization, the structural stream captures fine-grained local appearance cues, whereas the semantic stream encodes high-level facial configurations. The two feature streams are projected into a shared latent space and adaptively fused using a gated fusion mechanism that learns sample-specific weights, allowing the model to prioritize the more reliable feature source under dataset shift. Extensive experiments on KDEF along with zero-shot cross-dataset evaluation on CK+ using a strict train-on-KDEF/test-on-CK+ protocol with subject-independent splits demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. CA-GFNet achieves 99.30% accuracy on KDEF and 98.98% on CK+ while requiring significantly fewer parameters than conventional deep FER models. These results confirm that adaptive gated fusion of shallow and deep features can deliver both high recognition accuracy and strong cross-dataset robustness. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Algorithms in Multimodal Affective Computing)
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