Who Should I Trust? Explicit Confidence-Focused Multimodal Intent Recognition

Abstract Multimodal intent recognition is aimed at understanding user intentions by integrating information from multiple modalities. It has attracted increasing attention in recently developed dialog systems. The existing studies have focused mainly on modeling semantic interactions within and across modalities, but they often overlook the reliability of each modality. In real-world scenarios, inputs may be corrupted by noisy audio, blurred or occluded videos, or ambiguous text, making it difficult for the employed model to determine who to trust and how much to trust. To address this challenge, we propose a method called explicit confidence-focused multimodal intent recognition (ECFMIR). The core idea of this approach is to assign each modality and each cross-modal associations feature a dedicated confidence lens (CLens) that explicitly estimates the confidence level in a hypothetical manner. This design helps reduce the degree of uncertainty and mitigate the risk of incorrect predictions when addressing conflicting inputs. Comprehensive experiments conducted on two benchmark multimodal intent recognition datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. A further analysis reveals that ECFMIR achieves significant advantages for high-conflict categories and under low-resource conditions.