Image–Text Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Large Model-Generated Descriptive Semantics and Difference-Aware Gated Fusion

Image–text multimodal sentiment analysis aims to integrate textual and visual information to comprehensively understand sentiment expressions in complex scenarios. However, existing methods focus on cross-modal feature interaction and fusion, and still have difficulty capturing effective sentiment cues in scenarios involving insufficient textual semantics, implicit visual affective cues, and inconsistent sentiment expressions between text and image. To address these issues, this paper proposes an image–text multimodal sentiment analysis method with large model-generated descriptive semantics and difference-aware gated fusion. Specifically, a large model generates semantic descriptions for image–text pairs, from which an enhanced semantic view is constructed to supplement implicit or insufficiently expressed sentiment cues in the original modalities. An original-enhanced dual-branch structure models the original image–text evidence and enhanced semantic evidence separately. To improve semantic consistency between the two branches, a cross-branch semantic alignment mechanism is introduced to reduce semantic shifts caused by enhanced information. In the fusion stage, difference-aware gated fusion and residual compensation are employed to adaptively balance branch contributions while preserving discriminative branch differences. Experimental results on the MVSA-Single and MVSA-Multiple datasets show that the proposed method improves performance in image–text multimodal sentiment classification, thereby validating the effectiveness of combining semantic enhancement with difference-aware modeling.