Image–Text Sentiment Analysis Based on Dual-Path Interaction Network with Multi-Level Consistency Learning

With the continuous evolution of social media, users are increasingly inclined to express their personal emotions on digital platforms by integrating information presented in multiple modalities. Within this context, research on image–text sentiment analysis has garnered significant attention. Prior research efforts have made notable progress by leveraging shared emotional concepts across visual and textual modalities. However, existing cross-modal sentiment analysis methods face two key challenges: Previous approaches often focus excessively on fusion, resulting in learned features that may not achieve emotional alignment; traditional fusion strategies are not optimized for sentiment tasks, leading to insufficient robustness in final sentiment discrimination. To address the aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a Dual-path Interaction Network with Multi-level Consistency Learning (DINMCL). It employs a multi-level feature representation module to decouple the global and local features of both text and image. These decoupled features are then fed into the Global Congruity Learning (GCL) and Local Crossing-Congruity Learning (LCL) modules, respectively. GCL models global semantic associations using Crossing Prompter, while LCL captures local consistency in fine-grained emotional cues across modalities through cross-modal attention mechanisms and adaptive prompt injection. Finally, a CLIP-based adaptive fusion layer integrates the multi-modal representations in a sentiment-oriented manner. Experiments on the MVSA_Single, MVSA_Multiple, and TumEmo datasets with baseline models such as CTMWA and CLMLF demonstrate that DINMCL significantly outperforms mainstream models in sentiment classification accuracy and F1-score and exhibits strong robustness when handling samples containing highly noisy symbols.