Affective Computing

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Overview

Affective computing studies how machines can infer and work with emotion, mood, engagement, and related states from speech, facial and bodily behavior, text, and physiological signals. Common approaches include supervised classifiers, multimodal fusion, temporal models that track changing affect, and appraisal-based or language-model methods for interpreting context. Applications span healthcare and wearables, education, human-robot interaction, and emotionally responsive digital tools, with evaluation increasingly extending from controlled datasets to naturalistic conversations and daily-life settings. A central challenge is that emotional cues are ambiguous and vary across people and cultures, so accuracy must be balanced with uncertainty, fairness, privacy, and respect for the limits of what a system can infer about an individual.

Latest papers

CardsList

141 papers14 papers in the last four weeks, down 18% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Forging Emotions: a deep learning experiment on emotions and art

    Oct 23, 2026Amalia FokaImage GenerationAffective Computing

    University of Ioannina

  2. From Acceptance and Avoidance to Affective Viscosity: Designing Social Agents Intermediating in Human Relationships

    Oct 21, 2026Tomoko YonezawaHuman-Robot InteractionAffective Computing

    Kansai University, Takatsuki, Osaka, Japan

  3. Emotion Is Not External Knowledge: Internal Attention Signals for Affective State Reasoning

    Oct 15, 2026Wenqiu Tang, Zhen Wan, Yihui Wang +2Emotion Representation in Language ModelsEmotion Recognition

    Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan · National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

  4. Mixed Feelings, Single Polarity

    Oct 11, 2026Emily Öhman, Saif MohammadSentiment AnalysisAffective Computing

    Waseda University, Japan · National Research Council Canada

  5. What We Talk About When We Talk About Emotion Editing

    Oct 9, 2026Xingzu Zhan, Lin Gu, Ruogu FangImage EditingAffective Computing

    Department of Biomedical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA · Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

  6. Cognition-Oriented Emotion Tracing from Causes to Consequences in Real-World Social Scenes

    Oct 8, 2026Hao Li, Jinye Zhang, Bobo Li +5Affective ComputingMultimodal Emotion Recognition

    School of Computer Science, National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China

  7. Emoception: Selective Affective Layer Fine-Tuning of Video Vision Transformers for Player Arousal Change Recognition From Gameplay Footage

    Oct 6, 2026Yi Xia, Ibrahim Khan, Mury Fajar Dewantoro +2Vision TransformerAffective Computing

    Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Osaka, Japan · College of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Osaka, Japan · Alumni Association of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

  8. Neurodiversity-Aware Multimodal Affective Computing for Neurodevelopmental Assessment: From Norm-Referenced Classification to Context-Sensitive Decision Support

    Oct 3, 2026Mateusz Pomianek, Anna Łężniak-SerugaAffective ComputingUncertainty-Aware Multimodal Fusion

    Department of Computer and Control Engineering, Rzeszow University of Technology, Rzeszów, Poland · School of Human Sciences, VIZJA University, Warsaw, Poland

  9. Modeling Shared and Individual Structure for Cross-Subject Continuous Affect Regression from EEG-fNIRS

    Oct 2, 2026Xuan Wang, Bing Wang, Shuai Chang +3Valence-Arousal ModelingAffective Computing

  10. Artifact Annotations Partially Substitute for Per-User Calibration: SAFE-EDA and a Normalization-Controlled Evaluation of Wrist-EDA Affect Recognition

    Oct 1, 2026Haochen Chai, Xinbi Luo, Zining Liu +1Self-Supervised Pre-TrainingAffective Computing

    College of Medicine and Biological Information Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China

  11. VISTA: Value-Informed Event Appraisal for Multimodal Emotion Conflict

    Sep 29, 2026Jiale Dai, Liuxian Ma, Xiaoke Niu +5Multimodal Emotion RecognitionMultimodal Fusion

    State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University · College of Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University · China United Network Communications Group Co., Ltd.

  12. Multimodal Detection of Higher-Order Behavioral Constructs: Self-Compassion in Structured Reflective Interaction

    Sep 29, 2026Siddhant Jain, Dimitra TsovaltziAffective Computing

    Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI) Saarbrücken, Saarland, Germany · Universität des Saarlandes Saarbrücken, Saarland, Germany

  13. AffectReveal: Event-Grounded Emotion Recognition Beyond Visual Appearances

    Sep 29, 2026Yihao Qian, Runhao Zeng, Sicheng Zhao +3Evidence-Grounded ReasoningMultimodal Emotion Recognition

    South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China · Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, Shenzhen, China · Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

  14. Beyond End-to-End Black Box Mapping: An Intentional Agent Framework for Cognitive-driven Facial Reaction Generation

    Sep 28, 2026Hanzhong Zhang, Jindong Wang, Siyang SongCognitive Architectures for AI AgentsAffective Computing

    Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK · Department of Data Science, William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA

  15. Empath: Tracing Multi-Level Emotion Dynamics in Crisis Counseling Dialogues

    Sep 24, 2026Ziwei Gong, Yuchen Huang, Wen Liang +4Mental Health CounselingEmotional Support Conversation

    Columbia University, USA · Barnard College, USA

  16. Dimension-Specific Imbalance and an Adaptive Hybrid Label Strategy for Multi-Task Affective State Recognition in Classroom Video

    Sep 23, 2026Xiangqian LiAffective ComputingClass-Imbalanced Learning

    The Education University of Hong Kong

  17. Building Socio-Affective Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Multi-Agent Simulations

    Sep 22, 2026David BergaHuman-AI InteractionMulti-Agent Systems

    Escola de Noves Tecnologies Interactives (ENTI), Universitat de Barcelona, Spain

  18. Ability-Residual Decoupled Modeling for Affective Cognitive Diagnosis

    Sep 18, 2026Boyuan Zhao, Meng YeCognitive Diagnostic ModelsEducational Data Mining

    Key Laboratory of Modern Teaching Technology, Shaanxi Normal University, 199 Chang’an South Road, Xi’an, 710062, Shaanxi, China.

  19. Affective Shared Autonomy: Temporal Affect Dynamics and Subjective Evaluation in Bimanual Teleoperation Tasks

    Sep 17, 2026Zhengji Liang, Guiyin Tian, Sijin Qu +2Robot TeleoperationMultimodal Emotion Recognition

    Department of Data and Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.

  20. From Momentary Emotion Inference to Sustained Emotion Support: Evaluating a Companion Agent in a Longitudinal Study

    Sep 14, 2026Kexin Quan, Zijian Ding, Jiaye Yong +3Emotional Support ConversationAI Companions

    School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, United States · College of Information, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, United States +1

  21. Spook the Machine: Gamified Exploration of Human Imagination of Machine Fear

    Sep 14, 2026Levin Brinkmann, Hiromu Yakura, Sonia Nicoletti +9Human-AI InteractionHuman-AI Co-Creation

    Max Planck Institute for Human Development · Max Planck Institute for Software Systems · Tallinn University +1

  22. Pseudo-Label Augmentation for Affect Sensing in Small Collaborative Groups

    Sep 13, 2026Meisam Jamshidi Seikavandi, Tanya Ignatenko, Fabricio Batista Narcizo +3Affective ComputingPseudo-Labeling

    IT University of Copenhagen brAIn Lab Copenhagen, Denmark · GN Advanced Science, GN Hearing Ballerup, Denmark · GN Advanced Science, GN Hearing Glenview, Illinois, United States

  23. Affective Agent: On-Device Personalized Intervention Reasoning for Wearable Systems

    Sep 11, 2026Reina Mun, Zishen Wan, Vijay Janapa ReddiMemory-Augmented AgentsAffective Computing

    Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

  24. Explainable Prediction from Mobile Sensing Data through LLM-guided Concept Integration

    Sep 9, 2026Yuning Wang, Iman Azimi, Amir M. Rahmani +1Concept Bottleneck ModelsInterpretable ML

    University of Turku, Department of Computing, Turku, Finland · University of California, Irvine, Department of Computer Science, California, USA

  25. Shifting Relational Paradigms for Affective Computing: Affective Resonance, Vitality Affects, and Vocal Interaction Fields

    Sep 9, 2026Cy Gorman, Yihang YaoEmotion Recognition in ConversationsAffective Computing

    Nurobodi, Australia

  26. Organization of Valence and Arousal in Vision-Language Representations of Built Environments: Insights from the EMOIS Dataset

    Sep 6, 2026Madoka Yonekura, Katsunori Kohda, Nobuhiko Muramoto +1Valence-Arousal ModelingAffective Computing

    Toyota Central R&D Labs., Inc., Nagakute, Aichi 480-1192, Japan

  27. A Computational Implementation of a Goal-Directed Theory of Affect

    Sep 6, 2026Bernhard Hilpert, Tamás Szűcs, Joost Broekens +1Affective ComputingComputational Cognitive Modeling

    Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science Leiden University · Research Group of Quantitative Psychology and Individual Differences KU Leuven

  28. Inferring Affective Consciousness in an Artificial Agent: A Case Study

    Sep 3, 2026Mark Solms, St John Grimbly, Bruce Bassett +7Machine ConsciousnessAffective Computing

    Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa. · Dept. of Psychology, University of Cape Town, South Africa. · Dept. of Mathematics & Applied Mathematics, University of Cape Town, South Africa. +6

  29. ArtSociety: Multi-Agent Multimodal Collaboration for Art Emotion Understanding

    Sep 3, 2026Jian Li, Fanfan Ji, Jinxiang Lai +5Multimodal Emotion RecognitionAffective Computing

    Nanjing University Suzhou, China · CSE The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Hong Kong, China · Tencent YoutuLab Shanghai, China

  30. AffectDelta: Beyond Emotion Labels for Image Editing

    Sep 2, 2026Xingzu Zhan, Lin Gu, Ruogu FangImage EditingText-Guided Image Editing

    Department of Biomedical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA · Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan