Exploring Large Language Models for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis: Challenges, Benchmarks, and Future Directions

Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA) aims to extract aspect terms and their corresponding sentiment polarities from multimodal information, including text and images. While traditional supervised learning methods have shown effectiveness in this task, the adaptability of large language models (LLMs) to MABSA remains uncertain. Recent advances in LLMs, such as Llama2, LLaVA, and ChatGPT, demonstrate strong capabilities in general tasks, yet their performance in complex and fine-grained scenarios like MABSA is underexplored. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into the suitability of LLMs for MABSA. To this end, we construct a benchmark to evaluate the performance of LLMs on MABSA tasks and compare them with state-of-the-art supervised learning methods. Our experiments reveal that, while LLMs demonstrate potential in multimodal understanding, they face significant challenges in achieving satisfactory results for MABSA, particularly in terms of accuracy and inference time. Based on these findings, we discuss the limitations of current LLMs and outline directions for future research to enhance their capabilities in multimodal sentiment analysis.