Paper Detail

Beyond Generative Decoding: Discriminative Hidden-State Readout from a Native Omni-Modal LLM for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Bin Wen, Tien-Ping Tan

arxiv Score 7.3

Published 2026-06-04 · First seen 2026-06-05

General AI

Abstract

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) infers human affect from language, acoustic, and visual signals. Recent methods increasingly adapt large multimodal models (LMMs) via generative readout: prompting the model to emit a sentiment score as a text string. While convenient, this ties continuous regression to discrete autoregressive decoding, incurring unmeasured costs. We revisit this readout mechanism and propose a discriminative formulation built on the Thinker module of a native omni-modal LLM (Qwen2.5-Omni-7B). Instead of text decoding, we map the final-layer hidden state of the last non-padding token to a continuous score via a lightweight regression head in a single forward pass. Using 4-bit quantization and low-rank adaptation (QLoRA), the entire 7B pipeline -- including video and audio processing -- trains on a single consumer GPU (RTX 5090, 32 GB) with 10-21 GB peak memory and 1.14% trainable parameters. Through a controlled comparison fixing the backbone, data, and LoRA configuration, we isolate the impact of the readout. On CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, our discriminative readout reaches state-of-the-art accuracy without task-specific feature engineering (MOSI: MAE 0.551, Corr 0.888; MOSEI: MAE 0.506, Corr 0.790) and exhibits strong multi-seed stability. In contrast, the generative readout -- even after equivalent supervised training -- more than doubles the mean absolute error, yields unparsable or out-of-range outputs (2.8% zero-shot), and suffers from higher latency. Modality ablations reveal a text-dominant regime on CMU-MOSI. Our findings indicate that how an LMM is read out is as consequential as how it is trained, demonstrating that a discriminative readout offers a more accurate, efficient, and reliable alternative for continuous MSA.

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BibTeX

@article{wen2026beyond,
  title = {Beyond Generative Decoding: Discriminative Hidden-State Readout from a Native Omni-Modal LLM for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis},
  author = {Bin Wen and Tien-Ping Tan},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) infers human affect from language, acoustic, and visual signals. Recent methods increasingly adapt large multimodal models (LMMs) via generative readout: prompting the model to emit a sentiment score as a text string. While convenient, this ties continuous regression to discrete autoregressive decoding, incurring unmeasured costs. We revisit this readout mechanism and propose a discriminative formulation built on the Thinker module of a native omni-modal LLM (},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05713},
  keywords = {cs.MM, cs.SD, eess.AS},
  eprint = {2606.05713},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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