Cardiovascular sensing systems must preserve clinically useful information despite signal degradation, wireless losses, energy constraints, and edge-computation latency. We introduce Physiological Information Reliability (PIR), a cross-layer framework that represents physiological information value jointly with wireless, energy, and computation states and uses a contextual bandit to adapt sensing and communication decisions. We integrate multimodal ECG/PPG signal-quality estimation with physiological information value and an adaptive network-coding layer under burst-erasure conditions. Across controlled multiseed experiments, PIR-LinUCB demonstrates a promising low-energy operating point while maintaining medical latency constraints and competitive physiological estimation performance relative to fixed and heuristic policies. We analyze the resulting accuracy-energy-latency trade-offs and identify limitations of proxy PIV estimation and simulated communication dynamics. These results provide an initial computational demonstration of physiological-information-aware resource allocation and motivate future clinical and real-channel validation.
Yangchen Yu, Qian Chen, Jia Li +5cs.MM cs.HC cs.LG
Multimodal emotion recognition (MER) benefits from combining text, audio, and vision, yet standard fusion often fails when modalities conflict. Crucially, conflicts differ in resolvability: benign conflicts stem from missing, weak, or ambiguous cues and can be mitigated by cross-modal calibration, while severe conflicts arise from intrinsically contradictory (e.g., sarcasm) or misleading signals, for which forced fusion may amplify errors. Recognizing this, we propose Dual-Path Conflict Resolution (DCR), a unified framework that learns when to fuse and when to drop modalities. Path I (Affective Fusion Distiller, AFD) performs reverse distillation from audio/visual teachers to a textual student using temporally weighted class evidence, thereby enhancing representation-level calibration and improving fusion when alignment is beneficial. Path II (Affective Discernment Agent, ADA) formulates MER as a contextual bandit that selects among fusion and unimodal predictions based on a dual-view state and a calibration-aware reward, enabling decision-level arbitration under irreconcilable conflicts without requiring per-modality reliability labels. By taking into account the full multimodal context and coupling soft calibration with hard arbitration, DCR reconciles conflicts that can be aligned while bypassing misleading modalities when fusion is harmful. Across five benchmarks covering both dialogue-level and clip-level MER, DCR consistently outperforms competitive baselines or achieves highly competitive results. Further ablations, conflict-specific subset evaluation, and modality-selection analysis verify that AFD and ADA are complementary and jointly improve robust conflict-aware emotion recognition.