aiqbench analysis
This research introduces RAFM_SER++, a lightweight multimodal framework designed to enable real-time emotion recognition in resource-constrained surveillance environments. By replacing computationally expensive bidirectional transformers with an asymmetric residual attention mechanism, the system reduces trainable parameters by over 60% while maintaining high accuracy on standard benchmarks. The approach offers a practical path forward for deploying efficient AI models where latency and computational overhead are critical constraints.
RAFM-SER++: A Lightweight Multimodal Emotion Recognition Framework for Real-Time Behavioral Monitoring in Surveillance Systems
arXiv:2609.07409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent multimodal Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) systems achieve high accuracy through interaction-heavy cross-modal transformers, but their computational cost limits deployment in latency-sensitive and resource-constrained surveillance systems. To address this challenge, we propose RAFM_SER++, a lightweight multimodal SER framework featuring an asymmetric Residual Attention Fusion Mechanism (RAFM). Rather than relying on computationally expensive bidirectional interactions, RAFM injects affective speech cues into semantic text representations through a one-directional residual attention pathway. Combined with a BYOL-inspired cross-modal alignment objective and attention-guided pooling, the proposed framework improves multimodal representation learning while maintaining low computational overhead. Experiments on the IEMOCAP and ESD benchmarks demonstrate that RAFM_SER++ consistently outperforms the HuBERT-Base baseline and achieves a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off compared with the state-of-the-art MemoCMT. Specifically, RAFM_SER++ reduces trainable parameters by more than 60%, achieves faster inference (79.60 it/s), and attains BACC scores of 81.10% on IEMOCAP and 95.39% on ESD. These results indicate that lightweight asymmetric multimodal fusion is an effective alternative to interaction-heavy cross-modal transformers for real-time surveillance applications.
Abstract:Recent multimodal Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) systems achieve high accuracy through interaction-heavy cross-modal transformers, but their computational cost limits deployment in latency-sensitive and resource-constrained surveillance systems. To address this challenge, we propose RAFM_SER++, a lightweight multimodal SER framework featuring an asymmetric Residual Attention Fusion Mechanism (RAFM). Rather than relying on computationally expensive bidirectional interactions, RAFM injects affective speech cues into semantic text representations through a one-directional residual attention pathway. Combined with a BYOL-inspired cross-modal alignment objective and attention-guided pooling, the proposed framework improves multimodal representation learning while maintaining low computational overhead. Experiments on the IEMOCAP and ESD benchmarks demonstrate that RAFM_SER++ consistently outperforms the HuBERT-Base baseline and achieves a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off compared with the state-of-the-art MemoCMT. Specifically, RAFM_SER++ reduces trainable parameters by more than 60%, achieves faster inference (79.60 it/s), and attains BACC scores of 81.10% on IEMOCAP and 95.39% on ESD. These results indicate that lightweight asymmetric multimodal fusion is an effective alternative to interaction-heavy cross-modal transformers for real-time surveillance applications.
6 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables. Accepted at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal-based Surveillance (AVSS 2026). (c) 2026 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Multimedia (cs.MM); Sound (cs.SD)
I.2.7; I.5.4; I.2.6
arXiv:2609.07409 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2609.07409v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.07409 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Full text under the publisher's open licence · 232 words
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