REVELIO: Universal Multimodal Task Load Estimation for Cross-Domain Generalization

arXiv:2509.01642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Adaptive interactive systems that respond to user mental state require task load estimation that stays reliable outside its training context. Models built in one setting rarely transfer, limiting real-world use. This work presents Robust Estimation Via End-to-End Learning of Multimodal Observations (REVELIO), a unified framework, dataset and evaluation protocol for cross-domain task load estimation. Cardiac, electrodermal, muscle, respiration, skin temperature, eye tracking and facial signals were recorded in 96 sessions, spanning a laboratory working memory task, a driving simulator and two games under consistent hardware and annotation. Multimodal fusion reached up to 0.87 area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, above single input eye tracking (0.83), facial action units (0.74) and biosignals (0.62). Multi-domain training stayed calibrated on domains seen in training, whereas removing the target domain caused the classifier to collapse in some applications. REVELIO provides a standardized foundation for measuring modality contributions and cross-domain generalization toward deployable workload-aware systems.