Dr. Dmitry Ryumin

Ambivalence/hesitancy recognition in unconstrained videos is a challenging problem due to the subtle, multimodal, and context-dependent nature of this behavioral state. In this paper, a multimodal approach for video-level ambivalence/hesitancy recognition is presented for the 10th ABAW Competition. The proposed approach integrates four complementary modalities: scene, face, audio, and text. Scene dynamics are captured with a VideoMAE-based model, facial information is encoded through emotional frame-level embeddings aggregated by statistical pooling, acoustic representations are extracted with EmotionWav2Vec2.0 and processed by a Mamba-based temporal encoder, and linguistic cues are modeled using fine-tuned transformer-based text models. The resulting unimodal embeddings are further combined using multimodal fusion models, including prototype-augmented variants. Experiments on the BAH corpus demonstrate clear gains of multimodal fusion over all unimodal baselines. The best unimodal configuration achieved an average MF1 of 70.02%, whereas the best multimodal fusion model reached 83.25%. The highest final test performance, 71.42%, was obtained by an ensemble of five prototype-augmented fusion models. The obtained results highlight the importance of complementary multimodal cues and robust fusion strategies for ambivalence/hesitancy recognition.

Continuous emotion recognition in terms of valence and arousal under in-the-wild (ITW) conditions remains a challenging problem due to large variations in appearance, head pose, illumination, occlusions, and subject-specific affective expression patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal approach for valence-arousal (VA) estimation that combines three complementary modalities: video, behavior-related, and audio. The video modality is modeled using GRADA-based frame-level features and Transformer-based temporal regression. We use Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct to extract behavior-related information from video segments, while Mamba is used to model temporal dynamics across segments. The audio modality is based on WavLM-Large with chunk-wise attention-statistics pooling and cross-modal filtering of unreliable or non-speech segments. To fuse modalities, we investigate two fusion strategies: the Directed Cross-Modal MoE (DCMMOE) fusion strategy, which models directed interactions between modality pairs with adaptive gating, and the Reliability-Aware Audio-Visual (RAAV) fusion strategy, which combines visual features at the frame-level while using audio as complementary contextual information. We evaluate the proposed approach on the Aff-Wild2 dataset following the protocol of the 10th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-Wild (ABAW) challenge. Experimental results show that multimodal fusion consistently outperforms unimodal models, with the best configuration achieving an average Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) of 0.658 on the development set and 0.622 on the test set.

Digital-avatar systems still provide limited control over emotionally expressive behavior in human–computer interaction, especially in Large Language Model (LLM)-based chatbots and virtual assistants with personalized visual embodiments. To address this problem, we propose Multimodal Avatar Generation (MAVAGEN), a multimodal avatar generation framework for synthesizing upper-body digital avatars with personalized appearance and controllable emotional expression. The user specifies the desired gender and age, as well as provides a short text input from which the target emotional state is inferred. MAVAGEN then retrieves an identity image from the HaGRIDv2-1M corpus and generates an avatar clip with synchronized facial expressions, hand gestures, and expressive speech. The framework uses the following six feature streams: textual features, emotion-distribution features, landmark-based pose features, depth-geometry features, RGB-appearance features, and acoustic features. In a quantitative evaluation against recent human animation methods, MAVAGEN achieves the best overall avatar quality, with FID 48.20, FVD 592.00, SSIM 0.741, Sync-C 7.40, HKC 0.929, HKV 25.30, CSIM 0.563, and EmoAcc 0.88. Ablation results show that emotion and acoustic features contribute most to emotional agreement, while landmark-based pose and depth features improve geometric and motion stability. These results support the practical use of MAVAGEN in personalized LLM-based assistants and other emotion-sensitive interactive systems.

Automated video-based detection of cognitive disorders can enable a scalable non-invasive health monitoring. However, existing methods focus on a single disease and provide limited interpretability, whereas real-world videos often contain co-occurring conditions. We propose a novel unified multi-task method to detect depression and Parkinson’s disease (PD) from in-the-wild video data called DEPART (DEpression and PArkinson’s Recognition Technique). It performs body region extraction, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP)-based visual encoding, Transformer-based temporal modeling, and prototype-aware classification with a gated fusion technique. Gradient-based attention maps are used to visualize task-specific regions that drive predictions. Experiments on the In-the-Wild Speech Medical (WSM) corpus demonstrate competitive performance: the multi-task model achieves Recall of 82.39% for depression and 78.20% for PD, compared with 87.76% and 78.20%, for the best single-task models. The multi-task learning initially increases false positives for healthy persons in the PD subset, mainly due to annotation–modality mismatches, static visual content misinterpreted as motor impairments, and occasional body detection failures. After cleaning the test data, Recall for healthy individuals becomes comparable across models; the multi-task model improves Recall for both depression (from 82.39% to 87.50%) and PD (from 78.20% to 86.14%), suggesting better robustness for real-life clinical applications.

The growing demand for personalized human-computer interaction calls for methods that jointly model emotional states and personality traits. However, large-scale multimodal corpora annotated for both tasks are still lacking. This challenge stems from integrating diverse, task-specific corpora with divergent modality informativeness and domain characteristics. To address it, we propose SSL-MEPR, a semi-supervised multi-task cross-domain learning framework for Multimodal Emotion and Personality Recognition, which enables cross-task knowledge transfer without jointly labeled data. SSL-MEPR employs a three-stage strategy, progressively integrating unimodal single-task, unimodal multi-task, and multimodal multi-task models. Key innovations include Graph Attention Fusion, task-specific query-based cross-attention, predict projectors, and guide banks, which enable robust fusion and effective use of semi-labeled data via a modified GradNorm method. Evaluated on MOSEI (emotion) and FIv2 (personality), SSL-MEPR achieves a mean Weighted Accuracy (mWACC) of 70.26 and a mean Accuracy (mACC) of 92.88 in single-task cross-domain settings, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Multi-task learning reveals domain-induced misalignment in modality informativeness but still uncovers consistent psychological patterns: sadness correlates with lower personality trait scores, while happiness aligns with higher ones. This work establishes a new paradigm for extracting cross-task psychological knowledge from disjoint multimodal corpora, demonstrating that semi-supervised multi-task cross-domain learning can bridge annotation gaps while preserving theoretically grounded emotion–personality relationships.

Bimodal emotion recognition based on audio and text is widely adopted in video-constrained real-world applications such as call centers and voice assistants. However, existing systems suffer from limited cross-domain generalization and monolingual bias. To address these limitations, a cross-lingual bimodal emotion recognition method is proposed, integrating Mamba-based temporal encoders for audio (Wav2Vec2.0) and text (Jina-v3) with a Transformer-based cross-modal fusion architecture (BiFormer). Three corpus-adaptive augmentation strategies are introduced: (1) Stacked Data Sampling, in which short utterances are concatenated to stabilize sequence length; (2) Label Smoothing Generation based on Large Language Model, where the Qwen3-4B model is prompted to detect subtle emotional cues missed by annotators, producing soft labels that reflect latent emotional co-occurrences; and (3) Text-to-Utterance Generation, in which emotionally labeled utterances are generated by ChatGPT-5 and synthesized into speech using the DIA-TTS model, enabling controlled creation of affective audio–text pairs without human annotation. BiFormer is trained jointly on the English Multimodal EmotionLines Dataset and the Russian Emotional Speech Dialogs corpus, enabling cross-lingual transfer without parallel data. Experimental results show that the optimal data augmentation strategy is corpus-dependent: Stacked Data Sampling achieves the best performance on short, noisy English utterances, while Label Smoothing Generation based on Large Language Model better captures nuanced emotional expressions in longer Russian utterances. Text-to-Utterance Generation does not yield a measurable gain due to current limitations in expressive speech synthesis. When combined, the two best performing strategies produce complementary improvements, establishing new state-of-the-art performance in both monolingual and cross-lingual settings.

Compound Expression Recognition (CER), a subfield of affective computing, aims to detect complex emotional states formed by combinations of basic emotions. In this work, we present a novel zero-shot multimodal approach for CER that combines six heterogeneous modalities into a single pipeline: static and dynamic facial expressions, scene and label matching, scene context, audio, and text. Unlike previous approaches relying on task-specific training data, our approach uses zero-shot components, including Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP)-based label matching and Qwen-VL for semantic scene understanding. We further introduce a Multi-Head Probability Fusion (MHPF) module that dynamically weights modality-specific predictions, followed by basic-to-compound emotion conversion that uses Pair-wise Probability Aggregation (PPA) or Pair-wise Feature Similarity Aggregation (PFSA) methods to produce interpretable compound emotion outputs. Evaluated under multi-corpus training, the proposed approach achieves macro-F1 scores of 46.95% on AffWild2, 49.02% on Acted Facial Expressions in The Wild (AFEW), and 34.85% on C-EXPR-DB via zero-shot testing, comparable to supervised approaches trained on target data. Thus our approach effectively captures Compound Expressions (CE) without domain adaptation.

Automatic emotion recognition techniques are critical to natural human–computer interaction. However, current methods suffer from limited applicability due to their tendency to overfit on single-corpus datasets. It reduces real-world effectiveness of the methods when faced with new unseen corpora. We propose the first multi-corpus multimodal emotion recognition method with high generalizability evaluated through a leave-one-corpus-out protocol. The method uses three fine-tuned encoders per modality (audio, video, and text) and a decoder employing a context-independent gated attention to combine features from all three modalities. The research is conducted on four benchmark corpora: MOSEI, MELD, IEMOCAP, and AFEW. The proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art results on these corpora and establishes the first baseline for multi-corpus studies. We demonstrate that due to the MELD rich emotional expressiveness across three modalities, the models trained on it exhibit the best generalization ability when applied to other corpora used. We also reveal that the AFEW annotation better correlates with the annotations of MOSEI, MELD, and IEMOCAP, as well as shows the best cross-corpus performance as it is consistent with the widely-accepted theories of basic emotions.

Human personality traits (PT) reflect individual differences in patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Knowledge on PT may be useful in many applied tasks in our everyday live. In this paper, we present a first open-source multimodal framework called OCEAN-AI for PT assessment (PTA) and HR-processes automatization. Our framework performs PTA analyzing three modalities, including audio, video, and text, and includes three processing modules. All the modules extract heterogeneous (deep neural and hand-crafted) features and use them for a com- plex analysis of human’s behavior. The final fourth module aggregates these six feature sets by a Siamese neural network with a gated attention mechanism. Our framework was tested on two free-available corpora, including First Impressions v2 and our MuPTA, and achieved the best results. Applying our framework, a user can automate solutions of some practical applied tasks, such as ranking potential candidates by professional responsibilities, forming efficient work teams and so on.

People tend to judge others assessing their personality traits relying on life experience. This fact is especially evident when making an informed hiring decision, which should consider not only skills, but also match a company’s values and culture. Based on this assumption, we use the Siamese Network (SN) for assessing five personality traits by pairwise analyzing and comparing people simultaneously. For this, we propose the OCEAN-AI framework based on Gated Siamese Fusion Network (GSFN), which comprises six modules and enables the fusion of hand-crafted and deep features across three modalities (video, audio, and text). We use the ChaLearn First Impressions v2 (FIv2) and Multimodal Personality Traits Assessment (MuPTA) corpora and identify that all six feature sets and their combinations due to different information content allow the framework to adjust to heterogeneous input data flexibly. The experimental results show that the pairwise comparison of people with the same or different Personality Traits (PT) during the training enhances the proposed framework performance. The framework outperforms the State-of-the-Art (SOTA) systems based on three modalities (video-face, audio and text) by the relative value of 1.3% (0.928 vs. 0.916) in terms of the mean accuracy (mACC) on the FIv2 corpus. We also outperform the SOTA system in terms of the Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) by the relative value of 8.6% (0.667 vs. 0.614) using two modalities (video and audio) on the MuPTA corpus. We make our framework publicly available to integrate it into various applications such as recruitment, education, and healthcare.

A Compound Expression Recognition (CER) as a subfield of affective computing is a novel task in intelligent human-computer interaction and multimodal user interfaces. We propose a novel audio-visual method for CER. Our method relies on emotion recognition models that fuse modalities at the emotion probability level while decisions regarding the prediction of compound expressions are based on the pair-wise sum of weighted emotion probability distributions. Notably our method does not use any training data specific to the target task. Thus the problem is a zero-shot classification task. The method is evaluated in multi-corpus training and cross-corpus validation setups. We achieved F1 scores of 32.15% and 25.56% for the AffWild2 and C-EXPR-DB test subsets without training on target corpus and target task respectively. Therefore our method is on par with methods developed training target corpus or target task.

This article presents a research methodology for audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) in driver assistive systems. These systems necessitate ongoing interaction with drivers while driving through voice control for safety reasons. The article introduces a novel audio-visual speech command recognition transformer (AVCRFormer) specifically designed for robust AVSR. We propose (i) a multimodal fusion strategy based on spatio-temporal fusion of audio and video feature matrices, (ii) a regulated transformer based on iterative model refinement module with multiple encoders, (iii) a classifier ensemble strategy based on multiple decoders. The spatio-temporal fusion strategy preserves contextual information of both modalities and achieves their synchronization. An iterative model refinement module can bridge the gap between acoustic and visual data by leveraging their impact on speech recognition accuracy. The proposed multi-prediction strategy demonstrates superior performance compared to traditional single-prediction strategy, showcasing the model’s adaptability across diverse audio-visual contexts. The transformer proposed has achieved the highest values of speech command recognition accuracy, reaching 98.87% and 98.81% on the RUSAVIC and LRW corpora, respectively. This research has significant implications for advancing human–computer interaction. The capabilities of AVCRFormer extend beyond AVSR, making it a valuable contribution to the intersection of audio-visual processing and artificial intelligence.

Psychological and neurological studies earlier suggested that a personality type can be determined by the whole face as well as by its sides. This article discusses novel research using deep neural networks that address the features of both sides of the face (hemifaces) to assess the human’s Big Five personality traits (PT). For this, we have developed a real-time approach called EmoFormer with cross-hemiface attention. The novelty of the presented approach lies in the confirmation that each hemiface exhibits high predictive capabilities in terms of human’s PT distinction. Our approach is based on a novel mid-level emotional feature extractor for each hemiface and a cross-hemiface attention fusion strategy for hemiface feature aggregation. The consequent fusion of both hemifaces has outperformed the use of the whole face by the relative value of 3.6% in terms of Concordance Correlation Coefficient (0.634 vs. 0.612) on the ChaLearn First Impressions V2 corpus. The proposed approach has also outperformed all the existing state-of-the-art approaches for PT assessment based on the face modality. We have also analyzed the “best hemiface”, the one that predicts PT more accurately in terms of demographic characteristics (gender, ethnicity, and age). We have found that the best hemiface for two of the five PT (Openness to experience and Non-Neuroticism) is different depending on demographic characteristics. For the other three traits, the right hemiface is dominant for Extraversion, while the left one is more indicative of Conscientiousness and Agreeableness. These findings support previous psychological and neurological research. Besides, we provide an open-source framework referred to as OCEAN-AI that can be seamlessly integrated into expert systems with practical applications in various domains including healthcare, education, and human resources.

Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) gains increasing attention as an important part of human-machine interaction. However, the publicly available corpora are limited, particularly in driving conditions with prevalent background noise. Research so far has been collected in constrained environments, and thus cannot reflect the true performance of AVSR systems in real-world scenarios. Moreover, data for languages other than English is often unavailable. To meet the request for research on AVSR in unconstrained driving conditions, this paper presents a corpus collected ‘in-the-wild’. We propose a cross-modal attention method enhancing multi-angle AVSR for vehicles, leveraging visual context to improve accuracy and noise robustness. Our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results with 98.65% accuracy in recognizing driver voice commands.

Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) is one of the most promising solutions for reliable speech recognition, particularly when audio is corrupted by noise. Additional visual information can be used for both automatic lip-reading and gesture recognition. Hand gestures are a form of non-verbal communication and can be used as a very important part of modern human–computer interaction systems. Currently, audio and video modalities are easily accessible by sensors of mobile devices. However, there is no out-of-the-box solution for automatic audio-visual speech and gesture recognition. This study introduces two deep neural network-based model architectures: one for AVSR and one for gesture recognition. The main novelty regarding audio-visual speech recognition lies in fine-tuning strategies for both visual and acoustic features and in the proposed end-to-end model, which considers three modality fusion approaches: prediction-level, feature-level, and model-level. The main novelty in gesture recognition lies in a unique set of spatio-temporal features, including those that consider lip articulation information. As there are no available datasets for the combined task, we evaluated our methods on two different large-scale corpora—LRW and AUTSL—and outperformed existing methods on both audio-visual speech recognition and gesture recognition tasks. We achieved AVSR accuracy for the LRW dataset equal to 98.76% and gesture recognition rate for the AUTSL dataset equal to 98.56%. The results obtained demonstrate not only the high performance of the proposed methodology, but also the fundamental possibility of recognizing audio-visual speech and gestures by sensors of mobile devices.

Automatic personality traits assessment (PTA) provides high-level, intelligible predictive inputs for subsequent critical downstream tasks, such as job interview recommendations and mental healthcare monitoring. In this work, we introduce a novel Multimodal Personality Traits Assessment (MuPTA) corpus. Our MuPTA corpus is unique in that it contains both spontaneous and read speech collected in the midly-resourced Russian language. We present a novel audio-visual approach for PTA that is used in order to set up baseline results on this corpus. We further analyze the impact of both spontaneous and read speech types on the PTA predictive performance. We find that for the audio modality, the PTA predictive performances on short signals are almost equal regardless of the speech type, while PTA using video modality is more accurate with spontaneous speech compared to read one regardless of the signal length.

DAVIS is a driver’s audio-visual assistive system intended to improve accuracy and robustness of speech recognition of the most frequent drivers’ requests in natural driving conditions. Since speech recognition in driving condition is highly challenging due to acoustic noises, active head turns, pose variation, distance to recording devices, lightning conditions, etc. We rely on multimodal information and use both automatic lip-reading system for visual stream and ASR for audio stream processing. We have trained audio and video models on own RUSAVIC dataset containing in-the-wild audio and video recordings of 20 drivers. The recognition application comprises a graphical user interface and modules for audio and video signal acquisition, analysis, and recognition. The obtained results demonstrate rather high performance of DAVIS and also the fundamental possibility of recognizing speech commands by using video modality, even in such difficult natural conditions as driving.

In this paper, we present a new multimodal corpus called Biometric Russian Audio-Visual Extended MASKS (BRAVE-MASKS), which is designed to analyze voice and facial characteristics of persons wearing various masks, as well as to develop automatic systems for bimodal verification and identification of speakers. In particular, we tackle the multimodal mask type recognition task (6 classes). As a result, audio, visual and multimodal systems were developed, which showed UAR of 54.83%, 72.02% and 82.01%, respectively, on the Test set. These performances are the baseline for the BRAVE-MASKS corpus to compare the follow-up approaches with the proposed systems.

In this paper, we present a novel multimodal interaction application to help car drivers and increase their road safety. MIDriveSafely is a mobile application that provides the following functions: (1) detect dangerous situations based on video information from a smartphone front-facing camera, such as drowsiness/sleepiness, phone usage while driving, eating, smoking, unfastened seat belt, etc.; gives a feedback to the driver (2) provide entertainment (e.g. rock-paper-scissors game, based on automatic speech recognition), (3) provide voice control capabilities to navigation/multimedia systems of a smartphone (potentially vehicle systems such as lighting conditions/climate control). Speech recognition in driving conditions is highly challenging due to acoustic noises, active head turns, pose variations, distance to recording devices, etc. MIDriveSafely incorporates driver’s audio-visual speech recognition (DAVIS) system and uses it for multimodal interaction. Along with this, the original DriveSafely system is used for dangerous state detection. MIDriveSafely improves upon existing driver monitoring applications using multimodal (mainly audio-visual) information. MIDriveSafely motivates people to drive in a safer manner by providing the feedback to the drivers and by creating a fun user experience.

Visual speech recognition or automated lip-reading is a field of growing attention. Video data proved its usefulness in multimodal speech recognition, especially when acoustic data is heavily noised or even inaccessible. In this paper, we present a novel method for visual speech recognition. We benchmark it on the famous LRW lip-reading dataset by outperforming the existing approaches. After a comprehensive evaluation, we adapt the developed method and test it on the collected RUSAVIC corpus we recorded in-the-wild for vehicle driver. The results obtained demonstrate not only the high performance of the proposed method, but also the fundamental possibility of recognizing speech only by using video modality, even in such difficult natural conditions as driving.

We present a new audio-visual speech corpus (RUSAVIC) recorded in a car environment and designed for noise-robust speech recognition. Our goal was to produce a speech corpus which is natural (recorded in real driving conditions), controlled (providing different SNR levels by windows open/closed, moving/parked vehicle, etc.), and adequate size (the amount of data is enough to train state-of-the-art NN approaches). We focus on the problem of audio-visual speech recognition: with the use of automated lip-reading to improve the performance of audio-based speech recognition in the presence of severe acoustic noise caused by road traffic. We also describe the equipment and procedures used to create RUSAVIC corpus. Data are collected in a synchronous way through several smartphones located at different angles and equipped with FullHD video camera and microphone. The corpus includes the recordings of 20 drivers with minimum of 10 recording sessions for each. Besides providing a detailed description of the dataset and its collection pipeline, we evaluate several popular audio and visual speech recognition methods and present a set of baseline recognition results. At the moment RUSAVIC is a unique audio-visual corpus for the Russian language that is recorded in-the-wild condition and we make it publicly available.

This paper introduces a new methodology aimed at comfort for the driver in-the-wild multimodal corpus creation for audio-visual speech recognition in driver monitoring systems. The presented methodology is universal and can be used for corpus recording for different languages. We present an analysis of speech recognition systems and voice interfaces for driver monitoring systems based on the analysis of both audio and video data. Multimodal speech recognition allows using audio data when video data are useless (e.g. at nighttime), as well as applying video data in acoustically noisy conditions (e.g., at highways). Our methodology identifies the main steps and requirements for multimodal corpus designing, including the development of a new framework for audio-visual corpus creation. We identify the main research questions related to the speech corpus creation task and discuss them in detail in this paper. We also consider some main cases of usage that require speech recognition in a vehicle cabin for interaction with a driver monitoring system. We also consider other important use cases when the system detects dangerous states of driver’s drowsiness and starts a question-answer game to prevent dangerous situations. At the end based on the proposed methodology, we developed a mobile application that allows us to record a corpus for the Russian language. We created RUSAVIC corpus using the developed mobile application that at the moment a unique audiovisual corpus for the Russian language that is recorded in-the-wild condition.

In this paper, a new Russian sign language multimedia database TheRuSLan is presented. The database includes lexical units (single words and phrases) from Russian sign language within one subject area, namely, “food products at the supermarket”, and was collected using MS Kinect 2.0 device including both FullHD video and the depth map modes, which provides new opportunities for the lexicographical description of the Russian sign language vocabulary and enhances research in the field of automatic gesture recognition. Russian sign language has an official status in Russia, and over 120,000 deaf people in Russia and its neighboring countries use it as their first language. Russian sign language has no writing system, is poorly described and belongs to the low-resource languages. The authors formulate the basic principles of annotation of sign words, based on the collected data, and reveal the content of the collected database. In the future, the database will be expanded and comprise more lexical units. The database is explicitly made for the task of creating an automatic system for Russian sign language recognition.