QA-MoE: Towards a Continuous Reliability Spectrum with Quality-Aware Mixture of Experts for Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

arXiv cs.AI / 4/8/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper targets multimodal sentiment analysis under real-world conditions where modalities may be missing or degraded by dynamic noise, rather than assuming fixed corruption patterns.
  • It proposes a “Continuous Reliability Spectrum” that unifies missingness and quality degradation into a single continuous framework to better represent varying input reliability.
  • QA-MoE is introduced as a quality-aware mixture-of-experts model that estimates modality reliability using self-supervised aleatoric uncertainty and uses it to guide expert routing.
  • The approach aims to suppress error propagation from unreliable modalities while retaining task-relevant information from reliable signals.
  • Experiments report competitive or state-of-the-art results across multiple degradation scenarios and a practical “One-Checkpoint-for-All” property, suggesting robustness across reliability conditions without retraining.

Abstract

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to infer human sentiment from textual, acoustic, and visual signals. In real-world scenarios, however, multimodal inputs are often compromised by dynamic noise or modality missingness. Existing methods typically treat these imperfections as discrete cases or assume fixed corruption ratios, which limits their adaptability to continuously varying reliability conditions. To address this, we first introduce a Continuous Reliability Spectrum to unify missingness and quality degradation into a single framework. Building on this, we propose QA-MoE, a Quality-Aware Mixture-of-Experts framework that quantifies modality reliability via self-supervised aleatoric uncertainty. This mechanism explicitly guides expert routing, enabling the model to suppress error propagation from unreliable signals while preserving task-relevant information. Extensive experiments indicate that QA-MoE achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance across diverse degradation scenarios and exhibits a promising One-Checkpoint-for-All property in practice.