Pain is a complex and pervasive phenomenon affecting a large percentage of the population, and accurate assessment is essential for effective clinical management and intervention. Computational pain recognition systems enable continuous monitoring, support clinical decision-making, and help mitigate pain-related distress and functional decline. This study introduces a unified tokenization framework for heterogeneous 3D modalities in pain recognition that provides a single processing pipeline across behavioral and brain-activity 3D data, without requiring separate architectures for each modality or handcrafted inductive biases. The framework preserves spatial, temporal, and time--frequency structure while mapping diverse inputs into a shared token space. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach effectively processes facial videos and fNIRS data in both raw-signal and spectrogram-based representations. On the AI4Pain benchmark dataset, the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high computational efficiency and enabling real-time assessment on both GPU and CPU hardware.
Stefanos Gkikas, Christian Arzate Cruz, V. Becchetti et al.· arXiv.org· 6 citations
Automatic emotion assessment can benefit from combining neural and behavioral signals, but many multimodal approaches rely on separate, modality-specific feature-extraction pipelines before fusion. This paper presents MUPA\textsuperscript{2}E, a unified perception framework that processes facial video and electroencephalography (EEG) through a single shared asymmetric-attention backbone. Facial video is represented through axis-folded frame tokens, while EEG is processed either as a raw multichannel waveform or projected into the spatial domain for multimodal fusion. The framework is evaluated on the DMER dataset under a stratified subject-independent protocol, comparing unimodal video, unimodal EEG, and fused video--EEG configurations with per-channel and merged EEG projections. Using the original recordings, with shorter trials zero-padded to match the longest duration, merged fusion at stride~$30$ achieves the highest validation performance and a test accuracy of $70.07\%$. Further analysis revealed that recording duration is unevenly distributed across the affective classes, making the padding pattern a potential classification cue. Controlling for this factor by cropping all recordings to a common duration of $20$ seconds yielded a test accuracy of $62.71\%$, providing a stricter duration-controlled assessment of the framework in which differences in recording length are removed as a potential classification cue. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of processing structurally different neural and visual signals within a compact unified architecture while highlighting the importance of controlling duration-related cues in affective datasets.
Stefanos Gkikas, Eric Nichols, Christian Arzate Cruz et al.· 0 citations
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