The Illusion of Balanced Multimodal Sentiment Analysis: Beyond the Limits of Optimization-Based Methods

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.11247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) remains constrained by modality imbalance, yet the field continues to rely on optimization-based balancing methods that promise more than they deliver. We provide three contributions: 1) a unified evaluation framework testing gradient and loss-based balancing strategies under controlled settings; 2) a theoretical diagnosis explaining why these methods fail, as they conflate fitting speed with discriminative contr