Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) aims to infer emotional states by effectively integrating textual, acoustic, and visual modalities. Despite notable progress, existing multimodal fusion methods often neglect modality-specific structural dependencies and semantic misalignment, limiting their quality, interpretability, and robustness. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework called the Structural-Semantic Unifier (SSU), which systematically integrates modality-specific structural information and cross-modal semantic grounding for enhanced multimodal representations. Specifically, SSU dynamically constructs modality-specific graphs by leveraging linguistic syntax for text and a lightweight, text-guided attention mechanism for acoustic and visual modalities, thus capturing detailed intra-modal relationships and semantic interactions. We further introduce a semantic anchor, derived from global textual semantics, that serves as a cross-modal alignment hub, effectively harmonizing heterogeneous semantic spaces across modalities. Additionally, we develop a multi-view contrastive learning objective that promotes discriminability, semantic consistency, and structural coherence across intra- and inter-modal views. Extensive evaluations on two widely-used benchmark datasets, CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, demonstrate that SSU consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing computational overhead compared to prior methods. Comprehensive qualitative analyses further validate SSU’s interpretability and its ability to capture nuanced emotional patterns through semantically-grounded interactions.

Emotion recognition from EEG signals is crucial for understanding complex brain dynamics. Existing methods typically rely on static frequency bands and graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to model brain connectivity. However, EEG signals are inherently non-stationary and exhibit substantial individual variability, making static-band approaches inadequate for capturing their dynamic properties. Moreover, spatial-temporal dependencies in EEG often lead to feature degradation during node aggregation, ultimately limiting recognition performance. To address these challenges, we propose the Spatial-Temporal Electroencephalograph Collaboration framework (Stella). Our approach introduces an Adaptive Bands Selection module (ABS) that dynamically extracts low- and high-frequency components, generating dual-path features comprising phase brain networks for connectivity modeling and time-series representations for local dynamics. To further mitigate feature degradation, the Fourier Graph Operator (FGO) operates in the spectral domain, while the Spatial-Temporal Encoder (STE) enhances representation stability and density. Extensive experiments on benchmark EEG datasets demonstrate that Stella achieves state-of-the-art performance in emotion recognition, offering valuable insights for graph-based modeling of non-stationary neural signals. The code is available at https://github.com/sun2017bupt/EEGBrainNetwork.

Recently, LiDAR-based fully sparse 3D object detection has gained great attention, which utilizes point clouds to boost efficiency. Nevertheless, the relationship between well-studied dense representation and fully sparse representation is under-explored in existing studies, which focuses solely on building sparse representation by feature diffusion to solve the notorious center point missing problem. To this end, we propose a dense-guided fully sparse detection scheme, named DGFSD, to bridge the gap between dense and sparse features by dense-guided diffusion. Different from prior studies, we propose DgD (Dense-guided Diffusion) to overcome the center feature missing problem by dense knowledge transferring. Specifically, DgD transfers high-quality central point features from dense representations to endow sparse representations with dense knowledge. Moreover, we customize DFW (Dense Feature Weighting) to express uninformative representation and lift foreground representation. It makes high-quality dense feature contribute more to arcuate regression. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore dense knowledge's impact on fully sparse framework. Extensive experiments conducted on nuScenes and Argoverse2 benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Specifically, DGFSD achieves 71.6% NDS and 67.3% mAP on the nuScenes test benchmark. On Argoverse2, DGFSD achieves 40.6% mAP, outperforming previous best hybrid and fully sparse methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Raiden-cn/DGFSD.