GeoMER: A Joint Euclidean-Hyperbolic Geometry Framework for Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Ting Zhu, Huizhi Liang, Boguslaw Obara, Shufei Duan, Varun Ojha
Abstract
Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) aims to understand human emotions by integrating information from multiple modalities such as speech and text. Psychological studies suggest that emotions exhibit latent hierarchical structured relationships in their semantic representations. However, most MER approaches rely on Euclidean representations, which capture fine-grained cross-modal interactions but do not explicitly provide a geometric prior for organizing hierarchical emotional structures. To mitigate this gap, we propose GeoMER, a joint Euclidean-Hyperbolic modeling framework that introduces hyperbolic emotion-core routing to capture higher-level, abstract emotional representations for MER. The proposed framework jointly models token-level cross-modal semantic interactions and latent emotion representations in two complementary geometric spaces. Specifically, GeoMER consists of a Euclidean Multimodal Fusion Module (EuclFusion) for multimodal representation fusion and a Hyperbolic Geometric Core Routing (HypGeoRoute) module that performs geometry-aware core assignment and aggregation in a hyperbolic manifold to capture more abstract feature representations. The HypGeoRoute module complements the Euclidean token-level modeling. We experiment on the IEMOCAP multimodal MER benchmark and demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best performance, with 83.54% weighted accuracy and 83.35% unweighted accuracy, outperforming Euclidean baselines, including MemoCMT.