Correlation-Decoupled Knowledge Distillation for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Incomplete Modalities

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) aims to understand human sentiment through multimodal data. Most MSA efforts are based on the assumption of modality completeness. However in real-world applications some practical factors cause uncertain modality missingness which drastically degrades the model's performance. To this end we propose a Correlation-decoupled Knowledge Distillation (CorrKD) framework for the MSA task under uncertain missing modalities. Specifically we present a sample-level contrastive distillation mechanism that transfers comprehensive knowledge containing cross-sample correlations to reconstruct missing semantics. Moreover a category-guided prototype distillation mechanism is introduced to capture cross-category correlations using category prototypes to align feature distributions and generate favorable joint representations. Eventually we design a response-disentangled consistency distillation strategy to optimize the sentiment decision boundaries of the student network through response disentanglement and mutual information maximization. Comprehensive experiments on three datasets indicate that our framework can achieve favorable improvements compared with several baselines.