Forging Emotions: a deep learning experiment on emotions and art

Emotion-aware artistic image generation requires an image to match the input prompt, follow the specified artistic style, and convey the target emotion. In this challenge, the main difficulty is that the visual and affective attributes available in the training data are not explicitly provided at test time. Without these attributes, the generator has to decide not only what to depict, but also how the target emotion should be expressed through color, lighting, brushwork, composition, line, and layout. This creates a control gap between the available test prompt and the fine-grained conditions needed for emotion-aware artistic generation. To bridge this gap, we propose EmoStyle, a Z-Image-based framework that converts the input prompt into a structured generation state. An LLM reasoner first predicts affective cues (valence-arousal, dominant emotion, and therapeutic-effect labels) and an aspect-ratio decision. Instead of using these predictions only as additional prompt text, we encode the affective fields into an affective condition vector and inject it into the denoising blocks through AdaLN-style modulation. This allows the inferred control variables to directly guide the generation of intermediate features. Since emotional expression is also style-dependent, we further train a dedicated LoRA adapter for each artistic style bucket and select the corresponding expert during inference, enabling the same affective cues to be rendered with bucket-specific priors for color, texture, brushwork, and composition. Finally, a lightweight VLM-guided candidate selection step ranks the generated images based on prompt alignment, style consistency, emotional expression, and visual quality. In Track 1 of the AffectiveArt Challenge 2026, our USTC_PI_LAB_TEAM submission achieved first place.

Text-to-image diffusion models achieve high visual fidelity, yet fine-grained affective control remains difficult because textual emotion cues often fail to specify the visual perceptual factors underlying affective expression. Existing visual-affect datasets are likewise often limited to discrete labels, specific domains, or limited supervision of perceptual attributes. We introduce EmoScene, a large-scale dual-space dataset for controllable affective image generation, containing 1.2M images across more than 300 scene categories. Its affective space jointly represents discrete emotions and continuous valence--arousal--dominance (VAD), its perceptual space records measurable appearance attributes, and contextual descriptions ground both in scene semantics. EmoScene combines multi-model annotation with human-in-the-loop quality control. A random audit of 30,519 images yields 91.22% agreement on discrete emotion labels, while an independent multi-rater evaluation yields Fleiss' $κ=0.85$. After controlling for source and scene composition, affective dimensions and perceptual attributes exhibit stable associations across data sources, reflecting statistical tendencies rather than deterministic visual rules. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we further develop AffectCtrl, which learns residuals in the conditioning space of frozen diffusion models to support categorical emotion generation and continuous control over VAD, brightness, and saturation. AffectCtrl achieves 85.75% categorical emotion accuracy, outperforms EmotiCrafter in valence and arousal control under a shared evaluation protocol, and obtains Pearson correlations of 0.673--0.765 across all five continuous axes. These results demonstrate that EmoScene provides a scalable data foundation for analyzing and controlling affective expression in visual generation.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) have significantly promoted using text-to-image (T2I) models to generate images with specific affective intentions. However, the emotional effects conveyed by generated images frequently deviate from target expectations, and it remains unclear whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can reliably interpret the emotion of AI-generated visual content. Existing affective benchmarks are predominantly built on natural images, while affective studies of generated images have largely focused on emotions expressed in portraits, lacking a unified benchmark for studying the emotions expressed and evoked by generated images. We therefore introduce EmoGenie, a benchmark of emotion for AI-generated images that evaluates capabilities in T2I generation and MLLM understanding across expressed and evoked emotions. It comprises 6,400 images generated by eight T2I models using 800 emotion-targeted prompts, annotated with question-answer (QA) pairs, termed EmoGenie-QA, and continuous human ratings, termed EmoGenie-Assess. EmoGenie-QA contains 90,000 closed-set questions in single-image and image-pair settings, as well as 1,057 open-ended questions for emotion description. EmoGenie-Assess benchmarks continuous affective and aesthetic prediction using 13,175 mean opinion scores (MOSs) aggregated from human ratings in terms of valence, arousal, dominance, and aesthetic quality. We further develop EmoProbe, which combines emotion question answering with response-aligned, dimension-specific regression heads for continuous score prediction. Experimental results show that EmoProbe achieves superior results on emotion-related QA tasks, while its affective and aesthetic predictions correlate better with human ratings, demonstrating its state-of-the-art capabilities of unified coarse-to-fine affective understanding for AI-generated images.