Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) systems often suffer from missing modalities in real-world scenarios. Existing methods usually generate, align, or distill missing modalities as a whole, overlooking the heterogeneous nature of the information carried by each modality. Such holistic treatment mixes inferable shared semantics with uncertain modality-specific details, yielding unstable representations and degrading robustness. To address this issue, we propose the Primitive Memory Distillation (PriMD) framework. Unlike existing methods, PriMD takes an intra-modal perspective and focuses on how different types of information within a modality differ in recoverability within each modality. PriMD first disentangles cross-modal shared semantics from modality-specific representations, and then discretizes the latter into learnable semantic primitives to construct modality-specific memory banks. When modalities are missing, PriMD is a teacher–student framework that the student model uses the shared semantics of available modalities as queries to dynamically retrieve primitives. It compensates for missing modality-specific information within a constrained memory space and aligns with the teacher model. Extensive experiments on IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSI, and CMU-MOSEI demonstrate that PriMD achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently stronger robustness across a wide range of missing-modality settings, while mitigating the instability caused by holistic feature inference. Our code and project website are available at https://github.com/JiaqiZhang-Sengoku/PriMD and https://jiaqizhang-sengoku.github.io/PriMD/, respectively.

Long-context inference in large language models is limited by the linear memory growth of the key-value (KV) cache. Existing eviction methods typically retain tokens with high accumulated attention or remove semantic redundancy, but may discard low-frequency tokens that connect distant dependencies. We propose CentralKV, a training-free framework that models attention as a dynamic sparse causal graph. Its Stream-Influence algorithm updates token centrality online and preserves structurally important bridge tokens during KV compression. The attention graph is constructed directly from the attention operation without separate similarity computation. Experiments on LongBench show that CentralKV improves over H2O, SnapKV, and GraphKV under strict physical memory constraints, particularly on reasoning-intensive tasks, with minimal latency overhead.