Beyond Static Alignment: Adaptive Arbitration for Semantic Incongruence in Semi-Supervised Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal sentiment analysis is fundamentally challenged by semantic incongruence, where ambiguous visual signals often conflict with explicit textual cues. In semi-supervised scenarios, naively fusing such noisy features contaminates the joint representation, while conventional static alignment strategies fail to effectively arbitrate conflicting modalities in this task, leading to error reinforcement during self-training. To this end, we propose a novel Adaptive Arbitration for Semantic Incongruence (A2SI) framework for semi-supervised multimodal sentiment analysis, which emphasizes stable cross-modal representations and reliable supervision. Specifically, we first constrain unreliable visual representations by leveraging the reliable textual modality as an anchor to align divergent embeddings and reduce representation noise. Based on this, we further consider the reliability of supervision signals and calibrate pseudo-labels by adaptively weighting evidentiary confidence from heterogeneous views. Finally, to prevent error accumulation caused by unreliable samples, we introduce a progressive arbitration mechanism that verifies pseudo-labeled data from dual perspectives, enabling the model to dynamically balance sample diversity and label purity throughout selftraining. Extensive experiments on the MVSA-Single and MVSA-Multiple datasets demonstrate that A2SI consistently outperforms stateof-the-art methods under label-limited settings.