Text-Guided Nonverbal Enhancement Based on Modality-Invariant and -Specific Representations for Video Speaking Style Recognition

Abstract Video speaking style recognition (VSSR) aims to classify different types of conversations in videos, contributing significantly to understanding human interactions. A significant challenge in VSSR is the inherent similarity among conversation videos, which makes it difficult to distinguish between different speaking styles. Existing VSSR methods commit to providing available multimodal information to enhance the differentiation of conversation videos. Nevertheless, treating each modality equally leads to a suboptimal result for these methods due to text is inherently more aligned with conversation understanding compared to nonverbal modalities. To address this issue, we propose a text-guided nonverbal enhancement method, TNvE, which is composed of two core modules: 1) a text-guided nonverbal representation selection module employs cross-modal attention based on modality-invariant representations, picking out critical nonverbal information via textual guide; and 2) a modality-invariant and -specific representation decoupling module incorporates modality-specific representations and decouples them from modality-invariant representations, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of multimodal data. The former module encourages multimodal representations close to each other, while the latter module provides unique characteristics of each modality as a supplement. Extensive experiments are conducted on long-form video understanding datasets to demonstrate that TNvE is highly effective for VSSR, achieving a new state-of-the-art.