SAMS-M: Explicit sentiment-guided alignment and multi-dimensional mutual supervision for multimodal sentiment analysis
Multimodal Sentiment Analysis leverages the fusion of heterogeneous data to achieve fine-grained emotional understanding, which finds extensive application in large-scale public opinion monitoring and data mining. However, existing methods face two key challenges: (1) cross-modal alignment suffers from redundancy and semantic drift without explicit modeling of sentiment-critical cues, inducing spurious correlations; and (2) heterogeneous representation spaces lead to imbalanced modality contributions, particularly under weak image–text correlation or sentiment inconsistency. To address these challenges, we propose an explicit sentiment-guided alignment and multi-dimensional cross-modal mutual supervisionbased model for multimodal sentiment analysis. The model primarily employs a fine-grained sentiment–saliency directed alignment mechanism, which leverages bidirectional cross-attention to couple textual sentiment cues with visual saliency, enabling precise localization of sentiment-relevant regions. Furthermore, we introduce a tripartite strong contrastive learning strategy to mitigate distribution discrepancies between heterogeneous modalities within a shared latent space, thereby enhancing cross-modal coherence and complementarity. Finally, we design a noiserobust gating-based fusion module, which, together with text augmentation and deep supervision, facilitates effective joint optimization. Experimental results show that SAMS-M obtains the best results on MVSA-Single and MSD and remains competitive on the noisier MVSA-Multiple benchmark; thus, the evidence supports strong but dataset-dependent performance rather than uniform state-of-the-art superiority.