Emotion Recognition

Detecting emotions is necessary for building systems that can accurately and adaptively interact with humans. Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) has become an important research focus to develop intelligent spoken interfaces. However, most studies predict emotions at the utterance level, ignoring the conversational context, along with the emotional flow and speaker interactions it carries. In this paper, we introduce ACERT (Averaged Contextual Emotion Representation through Time), a module that integrates a flexible-length window of conversational context to better capture emotional evolution in spoken interactions. To evaluate the robustness of this method, we conducted experiments on datasets spanning diverse emotionally expressive styles and contexts. ACERT outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on IEMOCAP, establishes the first context-aware benchmark on SAFE, and obtains strong results on MELD for unweighted, class-balanced metrics. Ablation studies show that ACERT's gains come from emotional and conversational continuity, rather than from speaker identity or acoustic conditions.

SpeechLLMs have shown strong potential for emotion recognition, yet they read the predicted emotion off a generative decoder not suited for classification: it can emit labels outside the target set and favors frequent classes. We propose a discriminative adaptation that reads the final prompt token's hidden state through a classification head, producing a label in one forward pass without modifying the backbone. Because this readout starts from the hidden state the model would otherwise decode, it gives a controlled comparison of generative and discriminative inference in an otherwise identical speechLLM. We keep the head a single linear layer, trading little accuracy for interpretability: each emotion becomes one direction in the LLM output token space, revealing associated tokens. On IEMOCAP, across two speechLLM architectures, it improves Macro F1 and removes hallucinations, with largest gains on realistic ASR transcripts. Our analysis reveals that these emotion directions encode indirect associations mirroring biases in web-scale text.

Physical teleoperation integrates human cognitive flexibility with robotic precision, yet demanding manipulation tasks frequently induce severe cognitive workload, acute frustration, and execution breakdown. Conventional shared autonomy paradigms rely primarily on task-based rules, such as spatial error boundaries, which disregard the operator's transient affective state and risk misaligned control interventions. To address this limitation, we propose an affect-aware shared autonomy teleoperation framework that dynamically modulates robotic assistance based on real-time operator state estimation. The system estimates operator affective states from synchronized facial video, cardiac signals, and bilateral arm kinematics, outputting a seven-state affective distribution and a three-category operational abstraction (neutral, productive, adverse). Affect-aware assistance is selectively triggered when the user is detected in a continuous adverse state, preserving task-positive engagement without unnecessary disruption. The empirical user study ($N = 30$) confirms that the proposed affective assistance increases the productive states by up to 39.7% without compromising user agency. The collected dataset represents the first multimodal dataset that provides continuous visual, physiological, and operator's bilateral motion tracking of temporal affective state shifts during bimanual teleoperation. Our multimodal fusion model outperforms zero-shot baselines (Qwen, MiniCPM-V) in tracking temporal state dynamics. This real-world deployment offers a new human-centric framework that integrates visual, physiological, and motion tracking for physical human-robot interaction.

Automated visual analysis opens new avenues for behavior--based psychological measurement. Nevertheless, existing technological modules are typically scattered across task specific systems with heterogeneous interfaces and disparate deployment requirements. In this work, we present SeetaPsych v1.0, an open source, unified and extensible computer vision toolkit designed to extract psychologically relevant signals from facial images and/or face based videos. The current release encompasses four major core modules aiming at behavior--based physiological perception: unified face based emotion analysis (simultaneous facial expression recognition, facial action unit detection, and valence--arousal estimation), camera based heart rate estimation, screen point--of--gaze estimation, and scene gaze following. A suite of auxiliary preprocessing modules for human centric visual analysis is also included, comprising face detection, facial landmark detection, and head detection. These functionalities are encapsulated within a modular Pipeline/Runner architecture that automatically resolves attribute dependencies, constructs computation graphs, and support intermediate result sharing among modules. SeetaPsych provides standardized Python APIs to facilitate reproducible, large scale analyses, alongside an interactive WebUI for rapid, code--free method evaluation. Overall, SeetaPsych offers an integrated and accessible visual measurement platform for research in psychology, behavioral science, human computer interaction, and related fields.

Emotions are an essential aspect of human communication, particularly on social media, where authors frequently combine text and images to convey their emotions. Yet prior work on emotion analysis of social media posts has overlooked two important aspects in regard to measuring how well readers can reconstruct the authors' intent: (1)~the image modality, with most work focusing solely on text, and (2)~the real-world events that trigger the expressed emotions, and their relationship to the post content. We therefore study the relation between (a) the author's experience of the event that caused them to write a social media post and (b) the content of the post, with a focus on readers' capability to reconstruct that emotion expression. To do that, we introduce the Multimodal Multi-Emotion-Model dataset Mult2EMo, created by collecting annotations from both authors and readers on the posts and their triggering events. We find that reconstruction is possible but challenging for both human readers and computational models. We show that understanding the triggering event is crucial for accurate reconstruction, and that reconstruction is particularly challenging when posts rely heavily on the image to express emotion.

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a production capability behind agent-assist prompts, escalation routing, and post-call analytics in contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) platforms, where cost and latency constraints matter as much as accuracy. We report a systems-level comparison of three deployment options for dialogue-contextual ERC: a low-cost stacked ensemble (sentence embeddings, windowed context, RandomForest/XGBoost/logistic-regression stacking), off-the-shelf LLM prompting (GPT-4o-mini; zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought), and a confidence-gated hybrid that escalates only the ensemble's least-confident predictions to the LLM - modeled on IVA-to-human-agent escalation policies used in production contact centers. On IEMOCAP, the ensemble significantly outperforms every LLM configuration (0.595 vs. 0.460-0.536 weighted F1, p < 0.0001) at a fraction of the cost and sub-10ms latency; on MELD and CMU-MOSI the ranking reverses, showing neither pure system is a safe default. The confidence-gated hybrid resolves this by Pareto-dominating both pure systems on all three datasets (0.620, 0.643, 0.824 weighted F1) while routing the majority of traffic through the near-zero-cost ensemble, translating to roughly $10-85 per million utterances versus$99-170 for an LLM-only pipeline. The escalation policy is not an opaque cost/accuracy dial: escalated turns disproportionately follow an emotion or sentiment shift, giving operators an interpretable, auditable routing signal, and the ensemble's confidence is well-calibrated and safely under- rather than over-confident. The pattern holds across three datasets and two LLM providers. Confidence-gated cascading is established in general ML systems; our contribution is showing it transfers cleanly to dialogue-contextual ERC, yielding a concrete deployment recipe for CCaaS and conversational-AI platforms deciding how to allocate LLM spend.

Music Emotion Recognition (MER) aims to identify and represent emotional information in music through computational methods and is an important research area within Music Information Retrieval (MIR). To address the limited consideration of song sectional structure in existing dynamic MER research, this study examines 100 Chinese pop songs by aligning 1,046 manually annotated sections with continuous Valence-Arousal (VA) trajectories and analyzing them from the perspectives of section type, adjacent section transitions, repeated sections, and whole-song trajectories. The results show that emotional differences across sections are reflected more strongly in Arousal. Verse typically forms a relatively low-activation baseline, Pre-chorus exhibits a progressive buildup, and Chorus produces a more pronounced high-arousal arrival, while Interlude, Bridge, and Outro tend to show transitional, divergent, and closing functions, respectively. Although whole-song sectional configurations are diverse, high-frequency local transitions are relatively concentrated. High-arousal positions occur more often in the later part of a song, but are not fixed to the final Chorus. Based on these findings, this study summarizes the emotional organization of the selected pop songs as an empirical framework of "local cycles-global accumulation", in which local sectional cycles are accompanied by emotional pullbacks, while the overall trajectory exhibits a later-stage rise in VA and a tendency for high-Arousal positions to occur later in the song.

Activation steering has been used to control traits such as honesty, refusal, and sycophancy, yet supportive empathy is evaluated along multiple dimensions that need not correspond to independently controllable activation directions. Using the EPITOME framework, which decomposes supportive empathy into Emotional Reactions, Interpretations, and Explorations, we study three instruction-tuned LLMs and ask whether candidate directions derived from these labels produce distinguishable intervention effects or instead share structure, and how persona prompts interact with those directions. We find that contrastive activation addition yields a stable middle-layer intervention that consistently shifts the EPITOME proxy scores across models, moving empathy analysis beyond response-level scoring. However, the recovered directions are only partially separable: steering one direction induces off-target shifts, and hand-crafted prompting shifts the empathy profile rather than isolating a single dimension. Persona prompts substantially change EPITOME scores, but a paired activation-shift decomposition shows that the recovered subspace captures only approximately 3 percent of persona-induced squared activation-shift magnitude at layer 15. Under this EPITOME-based definition, expressed empathy is steerable but multi-axial, and controlling persona-conditioned empathy requires targeting structure beyond individual mechanism directions.

Empathetic response generation in spoken dialogue systems requires both accurate emotion perception and appropriate emotion regulation. Grounded in psychological theories such as the Perception-Action Model and emotion regulation theory, effective empathy depends not only on inferring a user's affective state but also on regulating how it is expressed in responses. However, recent large audio-language models (LALMs) largely treat emotion as a direct conditioning signal, lacking explicit regulatory mechanisms, which often leads to affect mirroring rather than calibrated support. We propose ER-EDF, a psychology-grounded framework that explicitly decouples emotion perception and emotion regulation in LALMs. Perception tracks the user's emotional state, while regulation determines how this state should guide empathetic response generation. The framework is model-agnostic and integrates seamlessly into existing LALMs. We further construct a spoken empathetic dialogue dataset and introduce empathy-aware evaluation metrics beyond lexical matching. Experiments across five LALMs and two datasets show that ER-EDF consistently improves empathetic response quality in both automatic and human evaluations, highlighting the importance of jointly modeling emotion perception and regulation in spoken empathetic dialogue systems, paving a new direction for psychologically grounded empathetic AI.

Deep learning has led to numerous proposed architectures for Automated Emotion Recognition (AER) from electrocardiogram (ECG) data, but inconsistencies in preprocessing, training, and evaluation make direct comparisons difficult. Most studies train and validate models on individual datasets collected under homogeneous conditions, limiting variability and raising concerns about generalizability. Cross-dataset validation is sometimes used but primarily assesses model adaptability rather than true generalization. This study presents a comparative analysis of prominent deep learning architectures in AER, emphasizing model generalization over dataset adaptability. To enable this benchmark, we introduce two open-source frameworks: Affective Research on Representations and Classifications (ARRC), a standardized benchmarking toolkit, and Affective Research Dataset Toolkit (ARDT), a framework for inter-dataset training and validation. Using ARDT, we consolidate three publicly available AER datasets, CUADS, ASCERTAIN, and DREAMER, into a single dataset, increasing variability in sensor types, recording conditions, and participant demographics. We then use ARRC to evaluate three widely studied deep learning models and two CNN baselines through hyperparameter optimization and 10-fold cross-validation. Our findings provide insights into the trade-offs between classification accuracy and model complexity, establishing a reproducible benchmark for AER research. All source code for ARRC, ARDT, and model evaluation is publicly available to ensure transparency and facilitate further research.

Affective computing has advanced wearable state inference, but on-device reasoning about whether, when, and how to intervene remains challenging. We present Affective Agent, a three-layer reference architecture for personalized intervention reasoning under uncertainty on wearable-class hardware. It combines a compact sub-billion-parameter language model with physiological evidence, context, and user history to decide whether, when, and how to intervene, without cloud dependency or per-user retraining. The architecture is organized into three interacting layers (perception, personalization, and reasoning), adapting to individual users through host-managed structured memory evolution rather than per-user weight updates. We instantiate Affective Agent in indoor environmental quality control and evaluate it on held-out, simulator-generated longitudinal scenarios spanning physiological variation, context, signal quality, and intervention history. Results show that memory-driven personalization and two-pass structured reasoning improve intervention decisions within this synthetic evaluation. By moving the decision layer on-device, this work demonstrates a path from wearable state inference toward closed-loop, personalized intervention on wearable-class hardware.

Continuous emotion control in text-to-image generation requires a model to improve affective alignment without changing the objects, layout, or scene described by the prompt. Existing supervised emotion-injection methods often optimize feature-space proxies and may therefore exhibit emotion-semantic drift, in which stronger emotional conditioning is accompanied by unintended content changes. We address this problem with a flow-matching image-generation framework that combines continuous valence-arousal (VA) conditioning, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), and a neutral semantic anchor. The deterministic probability-flow ODE is converted into a marginal-preserving SDE, yielding non-degenerate transition densities for trajectory sampling and policy-ratio estimation. A frozen CLIP-based VA regressor supplies a terminal reward measuring the distance between the predicted and target VA coordinates, while an image generated from the same prompt under zero VA conditioning provides a feature-space reference for semantic preservation. A reduced denoising schedule is used for online RL sampling, whereas the original schedule is retained at inference. Experiments on 3,300 prompt-emotion combinations show substantially lower valence and arousal errors than the VA-conditioned baseline and an improved CLIPScore relative to EmotiCrafter, with a measurable trade-off in reference-free image quality. The results support anchor-regularized Flow-GRPO as a practical approach to balancing emotional alignment and semantic consistency in continuous-affect image synthesis.

Computational recognition of verbal humour remains a challenging task, requiring an understanding of language, delivery style, emotions, and cultural context. Most existing approaches focus on binary classification and lack datasets that capture psychological dimensions of humour alongside variations in expression. We introduce MultiHuSE, a multimodal dataset comprising 2,407 high-definition videos of 50 demographically diverse actors performing 1,463 text samples across four psychological humour styles (affiliative, aggressive, self-enhancing, and self-deprecating), as well as neutral content. A subset is additionally annotated for underlying emotions. The dataset uniquely captures multiple actor interpretations of the same texts, enabling systematic analysis of expressive diversity. Baseline experiments show that multimodal fusion outperforms unimodal approaches (80.1% vs. 77.4% accuracy) in humour style classification, with particularly strong gains for affiliative humour (66% to 74%). While text provides the strongest individual signal, fusion models deliver meaningful improvements. We hope that MultiHuSE provides empirical support for psychological theories linking humour and emotion, while also opening new avenues for research in human communication, well-being, and AI-driven interaction. The dataset is available for academic use under an End-User Licence Agreement.

3D skeleton-based gait emotion recognition faces high annotation costs, data scarcity, and poor generalization on heterogeneous data. This paper proposes SV-GCN, a single-stream multi-feature fusion framework with temporal invariance. We introduce intra-frame relative motion features to eliminate frame-rate sensitivity and embed heterogeneous cues at shallow layers, enabling early fusion without multi-stream complexity. For variable-length sequences, we design a global mask-guided valid-frame spatio-temporal graph convolution module, introducing frame-rate insensitivity for the first time in this domain. On the E-Gait dataset, our method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art while demonstrating strong generalization across varying sequence lengths and frame rates, offering a viable pathway for pre-training on large-scale skeleton-based action recognition datasets.

Audiobook narration, conversational agents, and audiovisual dubbing require speech that conveys changing emotions and adapts its pacing within a single utterance. But most existing TTS systems typically rely on utterance-level style conditioning, making such fine-grained control difficult to achieve. In light of this, and inspired by the success of post-training in large language models, we propose a unified post-training framework that equips pretrained text-to-speech models with natural-language control over segment-level emotion and duration. Supervised fine-tuning establishes instruction-conditioned speech generation, while reinforcement learning with group relative policy optimization refines control accuracy using emotion and duration rewards alongside content and speaker preservation objectives. By reusing the pretrained architecture, our approach avoids additional inference-time control modules. Experiments demonstrate significantly improved fine-grained controllability while maintaining speech intelligibility and speaker identity, highlighting post-training as a practical approach to extending existing speech synthesis models.

Existing emotional support conversation systems mainly focus on one-on-one seeker-supporter interactions and individual emotional states, leaving interpersonal relations in multi-party scenarios underexplored. In this work, we introduce relation-aware emotional support conversation, a new task that evaluates whether LLMs can capture and utilize the evolving dynamics of relationships to offer more effective emotional support. We construct RESCUE (Relation-aware Emotional Support Conversation Understanding and Evaluation Benchmark) from real couple and family interview conversations, containing 191 samples, 7,079 annotated turns, and 1,064.8 minutes of video. Based on rich annotations of socio-emotional and support-related dynamics, RESCUE defines six tasks that evaluate two core capabilities required for relation-aware emotional support: Relational Understanding and Relation-Sensitive Support. Experiments with ten LLMs show that current models perform relatively well on tasks relying on local emotional or intervention cues, but struggle with relation-intensive tasks such as relation pattern prediction, viewpoint prediction, and support strategy prediction. These findings reveal the limitations of current LLMs in modeling interpersonal relations and making relation-sensitive support decisions.

Emotions are a pervasive feature of political communication, yet existing research has focused primarily on describing patterns of emotional expression rather than examining whether they are associated with consequential legislative outcomes. We address this gap by investigating the expression and correlates of discrete emotions in more than 1.7 million speeches delivered in the U.S. Congress between 1973 and 2024. Using a transformer-based emotion classifier, we measure eight discrete emotions: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, joy, enthusiasm, pride, and hope. We examine how these emotions vary over time, across policy topics, legislator characteristics, and their relationship with legislative effectiveness. We find that congressional speeches are becoming emotionally expressive over time. Emotional expression also varies systematically across policy domains and ideological positioning of legislators. Notably, the relationship between emotional expression and legislative effectiveness depends on the specific emotions expressed: enthusiasm and pride are positively associated with effectiveness, whereas anger exhibits a negative association. Emotional valence and emotional diversity are positively associated with legislative effectiveness, while emotional intensity is negatively associated with legislative effectiveness. These findings demonstrate that computationally derived measures of discrete emotions can provide insight into affective dimensions of legislative speeches and facilitate our understanding of how legislators communicate, interact, and perform within democratic institutions.

Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) requires integrating heterogeneous textual, audio, and visual cues while accounting for conversational context and emotional dynamics. We extend the Self-Distillation Transformer architecture for ERC with appearance+geometry visual representations, class-wise adaptive modality fusion, and a valence-arousal prior for affective transitions. On the MELD and IEMOCAP datasets, geometry-enhanced visual representations improve weighted F1 by 0.27 and 4.36 points over appearance-only features, respectively, while class-wise adaptive fusion provides further gains of 0.17 and 0.25 points over the original softmax gate. The valence-arousal prior yields targeted improvements of 0.30 and 0.74 accuracy points on emotionally shifted utterances while preserving performance on stable turns. These results indicate that structured facial cues, emotion-dependent modality weighting, and affective geometry provide complementary benefits for multimodal ERC.

Affective computing has largely followed an individual-state paradigm, extracting discrete emotion labels or arousal/valence from isolated speakers. We argue this framing is incomplete for interaction. Drawing on affective resonance and vitality-contour accounts, we propose a relational framework in which the primary unit of affective analysis is the interactional field constituted within vocal dynamics. As a proof of concept, we present a preliminary empirical study using continuous self-supervised speech representations to detect directional expressive coupling in multi-party conversation. Coupling is regime-specific, concentrated at sub-second timescales, and collapses under exclusive-speech negative controls, consistent with a relational account of affective dynamics. We introduce design frameworks for Artificial Affective Resonance Intelligence grounded in Affective Resonance Dynamic Ontologies, supported by null-calibrated directional coupling analyses across interaction regimes.

Ask a language model to respond "very excitedly," and its output is typically only mildly more energetic. We quantify this effect. We condition an instruction-tuned LLM on a continuous Valence-Arousal (VA) target, where valence measures how pleasant a state is and arousal how activated it is, measure the achieved affect with a frozen regressor, and sweep the requested target from -1 to +1. The response moves far less than asked: the gain, the slope of achieved against requested affect, is only 0.26 for valence and 0.13 for arousal on Llama-3.1-8B, where a faithful controller would score 1. The model systematically undershoots requested emotional intensity, which puts a number on the qualitative observation of Fazzi et al. (2025). Our experiments trace this to the preference-learning pipeline. Training targets from natural corpora such as EmoBank are neutral-heavy, and the sampled candidates themselves rarely reach extreme affect, so Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is left with no extreme exemplar to prefer. If instead we cover the target space uniformly and sample a hotter, larger candidate pool, valence gain rises from 0.26 to 0.40 +/- 0.02 (3 seeds) and extrapolation error drops, at only a modest in-distribution cost (EmoBank-test VA distance 0.092 to 0.107). The same recipe reproduces on Qwen3-8B (gain_v 0.44, with in-distribution accuracy preserved). Arousal is harder and less reliable: its gain barely moves on average and swings across seeds (0.14 +/- 0.07, against valence's tight +/- 0.02), because raising arousal needs candidates the base model is reluctant to generate. The evidence indicates that faithful intensity is bottlenecked by the extremity of the candidate pool rather than by the conditioning format.

Recent multimodal Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) systems achieve high accuracy through interaction-heavy cross-modal transformers, but their computational cost limits deployment in latency-sensitive and resource-constrained surveillance systems. To address this challenge, we propose RAFM_SER++, a lightweight multimodal SER framework featuring an asymmetric Residual Attention Fusion Mechanism (RAFM). Rather than relying on computationally expensive bidirectional interactions, RAFM injects affective speech cues into semantic text representations through a one-directional residual attention pathway. Combined with a BYOL-inspired cross-modal alignment objective and attention-guided pooling, the proposed framework improves multimodal representation learning while maintaining low computational overhead. Experiments on the IEMOCAP and ESD benchmarks demonstrate that RAFM_SER++ consistently outperforms the HuBERT-Base baseline and achieves a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off compared with the state-of-the-art MemoCMT. Specifically, RAFM_SER++ reduces trainable parameters by more than 60%, achieves faster inference (79.60 it/s), and attains BACC scores of 81.10% on IEMOCAP and 95.39% on ESD. These results indicate that lightweight asymmetric multimodal fusion is an effective alternative to interaction-heavy cross-modal transformers for real-time surveillance applications.

We present EmoMed - a multimodal medical consultation agent that adapts its responses based on users' emotional states while maintaining clinical accuracy. The system processes text and medical images, detects affect indicators (anxiety, confusion, urgency) from user input, and adjusts response tone, structure, and detail level accordingly. To ensure factual reliability, the agent grounds clinical information through a dual retrieval mechanism: web-based fact-checking and an API-connected, continuously updated medical knowledge base. We evaluate our approach across seven state-of-the-art language models (GPT-4/5, Qwen3, Llama 4, Gemini 2.5, Grok4, Claude3) using comprehensive metrics including LLM-as-judge assessments, MedQA style accuracy tests, BERT Score, safety/helpfulness ratings, and multimodal medical benchmarks. The results demonstrate that emotionally adaptive responses consistently outperform neutral baseline across evaluation dimensions, without compromising clinical accuracy. A controlled user study validated these findings, with participants reporting improved perceived empathy and communication clarity, while maintaining trust in factual accuracy. Source code: https://github.com/NasonovIvan/EmoMed-Agent

Head-mounted displays (HMDs) fundamentally limit emotion recognition in virtual reality (VR): by occluding the upper face, they render conventional image-based facial expression analysis incomplete, particularly for applications requiring real-time affective assessment. We address this challenge by fusing lower-face video with facial electromyography (EMG) from the occluded upper face to classify seven emotional categories (six basic emotions plus neutral). We introduce a synchronized multimodal dataset from 20 participants, pairing lower-face video with seven-channel upper-face EMG elicited by validated emotion stimuli. Under subject-independent test, our proposed late-fusion architecture merging convolutional visual embeddings with RBF-kernel EMG representations achieves 51% macro-F1, outperforming both image-only (41%) and EMG-only (43%) baselines. These results demonstrate that upper-face EMG provides robust complementary information under HMD-induced visual occlusion and establish a foundation for multimodal emotion recognition in naturalistic VR environments. This approach facilitates affect-adaptive applications, including communication training and therapeutic interventions. The dataset will be shared upon request under an ethical-use agreement.

Emotion recognition benchmarks often predict one emotion per text, missing many real-world scenarios where two people arrive at opposing emotions from a single shared event. For example, a child kicks the seat in front of her in excitement while the passenger ahead grows angry. We introduce CHIARO, a 1,000 human-annotated sentence benchmark for contrastive emotion inference grounded in appraisal theory. Each scene describes one causal trigger eliciting a positive emotion in one person and a negative emotion in the other, drawn from a ten-class taxonomy. We benchmark seven frontier LLMs and four off-the-shelf emotion classifiers. The strongest LLM reaches 67.3 macro-F1, well below human agreement, while existing emotion classifiers score near chance. Beyond evaluation, CHIARO also serves as a training signal. When combined with an existing emotion corpus, the resulting downstream classifier improves on CHIARO itself and on six of ten external emotion benchmarks, which positions our dataset as a complementary signal for emotion recognition.

Emotion is expressed in text along a wide spectrum, from surface lexical cues to inferences entangled with content. Most layer-wise analyses of emotion in LLMs use a single corpus, leaving open whether the depth at which emotion becomes accessible is a property of the model or also of the text source. We investigate this across three datasets spanning different degrees of explicitness and contextualization in emotion expression (Twitter posts, Reddit comments, and autobiographical narratives) and eight 1B--9B open-weight LLMs from the Llama, Qwen, and Granite families. We combine layer-wise probing with offline feature scaling and online forward interventions, transfer analyses, and an early-exit classifier. We find that (i) the best probing layer shifts systematically across corpora, from input-adjacent layers to over half model depth, and this ordering persists after matching label-by-length-bin distributions; (ii) across the evaluated settings, forward-pass interventions on probe-selected bands reduce test accuracy by 5--6 points more than same-width random bands ($q < 0.01$); (iii) selected bands transfer across datasets and emotion categories, suggesting partially shared affective information rather than strictly per-emotion substrates; and (iv) probe-selected early-exit representations outperform full-depth exits by $6.9$ percentage points on average.

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.

Natural-language instructions enable flexible control of synthesized speech, yet emotional TTS systems primarily model a single utterance-level affect, leaving multi-emotion control underexplored. We study two complementary multi-emotion TTS tasks: emotion trajectory, which spans several ordered affective stages, and emotion blending, in which multiple emotions coexist throughout an utterance. These tasks expose a supervision mismatch: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) does not explicitly evaluate emotion features, while single-emotion rewards provide neither structure-aware feedback for trajectory completion nor pair-aware feedback for blending. We introduce HybridEmo, a post-training framework that initializes both tasks with SFT and then aligns the speech-token policy through Group Relative Policy Optimization using a sample-aware hybrid reward. For trajectory samples, segment-aligned consistency combines average and weakest-stage evidence to preserve the correctness and completeness of prescribed stages. For blending samples, a GMM-based reward combines frame-level support from the union of target-emotion anchors in an offline emotion space with an utterance-level weaker-target margin. Both branches share an ASR reward and are routed within a unified policy. On MultiEmo-Test, HybridEmo significantly improves trajectory correctness and blending intensity, without a noticeable degradation in speaker similarity. Human evaluation prefers HybridEmo to CosyVoice 3 and EmoVoice-0.5B, with nearly balanced preferences against Qwen3-TTS.

Voice products increasingly need affective cues that are present in speech but absent from transcripts. We introduce VocalAffectBench, a public, test-only benchmark for evaluating whether AI audio models can identify expressed vocal emotion from raw audio. The benchmark contains 273 human-recorded English WAV clips from 51 speaker accounts totaling 1.95 hours across seven labels: angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, neutral, sad, and surprised, with 39 clips per class. All baselines are evaluated from audio alone, without transcripts or contextual metadata. Across six released baselines, average accuracy is 35.5%. The strongest baseline, gemini_3_5_flash, reaches 46.5% on the seven-way task, above the 14.3% random baseline but far from robust emotion recognition. A secondary valence-bucket analysis maps labels into positive, neutral, and negative classes, excluding surprised because its valence is ambiguous. Aggregate accuracy under this coarser view is 50.9%. Performance is highly uneven across classes. By recall, neutral is identified most reliably at 75.6% averaged across baselines, while surprised and fearful reach only 10.7% and 15.4%, respectively. These results show that the evaluated baselines can extract some affective signal from speech, but discrete expressed-emotion recognition remains fragile, especially for non-neutral emotions that are often most important in voice agent workflows.

Artists coordinate human pose, illumination, and camera placement to convey narrative and emotion, but existing generative methods typically model these elements independently. We introduce text-to-editable 3D staging, a task that jointly generates human poses, a dominant light, and a camera configuration from an affective description. We construct 11,911 text--staging pairs from 2,328 figurative paintings by reconstructing SMPL bodies, estimating low-frequency illumination, recovering camera parameters, and pairing each scene with ArtEmis descriptions. We train a flow-matching transformer that supports variable numbers of figures and produces multiple staging alternatives for each prompt. On held-out descriptions, the model achieves 32.2% retrieval R@1, compared with 16.6% for CLIP-based nearest-neighbor retrieval, while approximately preserving corpus-level diversity. These results demonstrate the feasibility of generating editable, emotionally conditioned 3D staging references from text.

Generative design interfaces increasingly expose semantic controls that let users steer output with concepts such as "more elegant" or "more minimalist," typically encoded by a vision-language model (VLM). A practical question is whether state-of-the-art VLMs represent objects consistently in terms of the same concept. We audit 6 VLMs by ranking untextured 3D objects along Kansei adjective pairs, where Kansei describes affective impressions of product form, with each axis defined as the difference between the text representations of its two poles. Geometric pairs serve as positive controls, and pairs of unrelated adjectives establish an empirical null. Across 10 categories of ShapeNet database, affective axes converge above the null (mean pairwise rank correlation 0.36 vs. 0.14) but below the geometric ceiling (0.44). The agreement between models is partial and highly uneven: on the three axes shared by all categories, mean convergence ranges from 0.21 for bookshelves to 0.51 for jars. Convergence depends primarily on whether a category's representational variation aligns with the semantic direction being evaluated, rather than simply on how much the objects vary in shape overall. Cross-model convergence does not imply agreement with human judgments. Based on our findings, we implement a UI prototype that shows how the audit can inform which Kansei descriptors to expose as controls for a given object class and which to withhold.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied for emotional companionship, evaluating their behavior and capabilities in intimate relationships has become a pressing issue. However, existing assessments primarily characterize general personality traits, providing limited insight into model behavior within intimate and emotionally sensitive contexts. Therefore, we introduce adult attachment theory into LLM evaluation and use the Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised (ECR-R) scale to characterize attachment anxiety and avoidance. To evaluate emotional companionship capabilities of LLMs in realistic interaction scenarios, we present an emotional companionship benchmark, ECBench, spanning four scenarios including emotional support, collaborative tasks, conflict resolution, and social guidance, across friendship and romantic relationships. ECBench is utilized to assess model behavior using 11 dialogue-quality metrics and three evaluation methods. We evaluate the attachment tendencies of 32 LLMs and select representative models to investigate how these tendencies manifest in contextualized multi-turn interactions and whether they can be shaped through prompting. Our study provides a theoretical lens from psychology, along with practical tools to understand and select LLMs for emotional companionship.

This paper introduces ViTOED, a novel dataset for target-oriented emotion detection in Vietnamese social media texts. The ViTOED comprises 10,985 user comments and 21,244 manually annotated opinion quadruples (source, target, expression, polarity) that follow strict guidelines. The dataset reveals Vietnamese-specific phenomena, such as implicit sources and targets and vocabulary ambiguities, enabling deeper analysis of user emotions toward entities. We propose a baseline using structured sentiment graphs and evaluate various Vietnamese pre-trained language models. The empirical results highlight challenges in span detection and relation extraction and indicate substantial room for model improvement in Vietnamese Target-Oriented Emotion Detection tasks.

Text-to-image (T2I) models are increasingly asked to illustrate literary and cultural content, yet we cannot measure how well an image renders the meaning of a poem. The task is many-sided: a good illustration must be visually sound, faithful to the poem's imagery and scene, culturally and stylistically apt, free of spurious text, and true to its emotion, and its deepest requirements, imagery and especially implicit emotion, are never stated in the words. Existing metrics (CLIPScore, BLIPScore, VQAScore) reward literal text-image correspondence and so cannot tell whether an illustration succeeds, let alone why, or even separate the best model from the worst. We introduce TangPoetryBench, a multi-dimensional benchmark of 1,280 images (320 classical Chinese Tang poems x 4 state-of-the-art T2I models) with quality-controlled human annotations across ten dimensions. Analyzing this data, we reveal the shared and model-specific strengths and weaknesses of current T2I models, including their ability to evoke a poem's implicit emotion. We further introduce PoemAutoEvaluator (PAE), an open, rubric-conditioned evaluator that reaches parity with a strong proprietary judge (Claude), generalizes to an unseen generator and a second poetic tradition (Song Ci), and lets the benchmark scale to new images without fresh human annotation. We release the benchmark, annotations, and evaluator.

Understanding both expressed and evoked emotions is critical for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve comprehensive affect-aware interactions. However, existing benchmarks typically examine expressed and evoked emotions in isolation or are constrained to coarse-grained and incomplete affective characterizations. To bridge this gap, we introduce E$^3$mo-Bench, a scalable benchmark comprising $12{,}314$ question-answer pairs across $2{,}524$ videos with predefined affective perspectives. It evaluates evoked and expressed emotion understanding via $3$ complementary tasks: emotion perception, open-vocabulary recognition, and valence-arousal-dominance (VAD) assessment. To efficiently scale reliable continuous annotations, we propose Bayesian Pairwise Alignment, which aggregates sparse, low-burden pairwise judgments into anchor-referenced VAD estimates. Furthermore, we develop E$^3$mo-Score, a training-free agent that aggregates complementary judgments from a five-model committee to improve VAD estimation. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework and expose a pronounced performance skew between evoked and expressed emotion paradigms. These findings, coupled with MLLMs' persistent deficits in fine-grained recognition and dimensional assessment, chart a clear course for advancing multimodal emotional intelligence.

Recent vision-language models demonstrate impressive general visual understanding, yet their art interpretation remains shallow: they describe surface content but struggle with formal analysis, grounded historical interpretation, or affective characterization. We argue this is not only a model but also a dataset limitation. Existing art datasets are single perspective resources, where no dataset provides narrative, formal, emotional, and historical perspectives simultaneously for the same artworks. We introduce MMArt, a large-scale dataset of 74,234 WikiArt paintings, each annotated with four independently annotated perspectives plus a harmonized unified caption, produced by specialized vision-language models or human annotation and validated through complementary quality evaluations. Two complementarity analyses establish that perspectives encode genuinely distinct information. A generative analysis shows that formal analysis descriptions best preserve compositional style, and historical descriptions carry strong affective signal in reconstructed images. A discriminative retrieval analysis reveals task-asymmetry: narrative descriptions drive retrieval (R@1 = 44.0%), while formal descriptions, strongest for reconstruction, are nearly nondiscriminative at retrieval scale (R@1 = 7.8%). Leave-one-out analysis further confirms that historical descriptions are the least replaceable perspective across both tasks. Together, the two analyses establish that no single perspective suffices for all tasks, directly motivating MMArt multi-perspective design. The dataset, code, and additional information are available at https://shuaiwang97.github.io/MMArt/.

Large language models have demonstrated conversational capabilities, yet empathetic competence remains challenging. Empathetic support is inherently multi-turn and path-dependent: users disclose concerns gradually, emotions evolve over time, and early responses shape trust and receptivity. Reinforcement learning with verifiable emotion rewards provides scalable supervision for long-horizon interactions. However, existing methods evolve the dialogue policy while keeping its training interaction distribution fixed, creating a mismatch between policy competence and training experience. We introduce a dual-loop self-evolution framework driven by verifiable emotion feedback. With the user simulator and verifier frozen, the inner loop optimizes the multi-turn policy using continuous emotion rewards, while the outer loop uses the same outcomes to estimate policy-relative interaction utility and adapt experience. To obtain estimates from sparse, stochastic rollouts, the framework holds the scenario and interaction state constant within each group and prioritizes conditions whose group pass rates lie near the policy's competence boundary. A hierarchical controller shares evidence across support intents, while uncertainty-guided exploration and uniform rehearsal prevent premature exclusion. The resulting distribution generates trajectories, closing both loops without increasing the rollout budget. On SAGE, our framework raises Qwen3-8B Overall from 53.87 to 79.24 and outperforms protocol-matched uniform emotion-reward reinforcement learning by 7.23 points.

Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) requires understanding complex interactions between verbal and non-verbal cues. However, most existing approaches fundamentally treat this as a direct input-output (multimodal cues-emotion labels) mapping problem, overlooking the causal reasoning that humans use when interpreting emotions. We propose rationale-guided learning (RGL), a novel framework that transforms MERC into a cognitively-inspired reasoning task. Based on dual-process theory, we decompose emotional reasoning into three facets: Intuitive (immediate perception, System 1), Contextual (situational analysis, System 2), and Integrative (synthesis of both). We leverage an MLLM offline to generate structured rationales, which are encoded as memories to guide model training via aligning internal representations with human-like reasoning patterns. Our final model operates without any MLLM overheads at inference time. Experimental results show that RGL achieves state-of-the-art performance on the IEMOCAP and MELD benchmarks. Further, for interpretation, we demonstrate that the model's internal features effectively retrieve semantically correct rationales for unseen test samples, validating its rationale reasoning capabilities.

Skill-based LLM agents select reusable procedures from an external library to solve complex tasks, yet their routing decisions rely entirely on text-level signals such as task descriptions, verbal reflections, and experience-derived rules, while the model's own internal representational state remains unobserved. Recent interpretability work has shown that LLMs maintain linear emotion representations that causally influence behavior; however, these representations have been exploited only for post-hoc analysis or direct output steering, and have not been used to inform agent-level decision-making. We propose Emotion2Skill, a framework that extracts LLM-internal emotion vectors and incorporates them into both skill selection and skill evolution. At each decision step, a 27-dimensional emotion state is extracted from the residual stream and mapped to a confidence-gated summary injected into the routing prompt. Beyond online selection, emotion trajectories are analyzed for abrupt internal-state shifts to pinpoint problematic skill invocations, guiding targeted SOP rewriting that replaces the coarse binary outcome signal of prior methods. On WebShop and ALFWorld, Emotion2Skill with Qwen3-8B improves over the Zero-Shot baseline by +26.9% success rate and +25.5% average success respectively, outperforming all baselines on both benchmarks with consistent gains on Qwen3-14B. Co-activation analysis further reveals semantically coherent emotion--skill pairings, confirming that the routing improvements reflect meaningful internal-state signals rather than opaque statistical correlations. These results establish LLM-internal emotion representations as an effective decision-level signal for orchestrating agent skill systems, extending their utility beyond interpretability and output steering. The code is available at https://github.com/BoHan-LIN04/Emotion2Skill.

Despite significant advances in instruction-following and auditory comprehension, the evaluation of Emotional Intelligence (EI) in Spoken Language Models (SLMs) remains confined to rudimentary paralinguistic perception, lacking a systematic, theory-driven cognitive framework. We introduce EmoSBench, the first comprehensive EI evaluation benchmark for SLMs constructed upon the four-branch theoretical model, covering Perceiving, Understanding, Using, and Managing Emotion across ten sub-tasks. Preliminary assessments on EmoSBench reveal a substantial gap: even leading proprietary models like GPT-4o-Audio achieve only 52.6%, significantly trailing human baselines. To bridge this gap, we develop EmoS, a specialized evaluator model optimized via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). To facilitate its effective training, we curate EmoDialogue, a bilingual dataset providing necessary fine-grained supervision through response pairs with rigorously defined EI gradations. Concurrently, we introduce a reward mechanism integrating a Steep Exponential Accuracy Reward (SEAR) and a Rationale Fidelity Reward (RFR) to enforce precise ordinal scoring and valid reasoning. Experiments demonstrate that EmoS reaches 83.8% accuracy, approaching human-level performance. Furthermore, evaluations on authentic, unconstrained spoken interactions validate its robust real-world generalization, establishing a foundational framework for advancing emotionally intelligent dialogue systems.

Mixed emotions represent a clinically relevant but still underexplored target for automatic emotion recognition. EEG provides millisecond-level access to neural activity, yet most EEG pipelines analyze the signal through a single temporal window, thereby fixing the temporal structure available to the model. This study introduces a multi-scale temporal framework for EEG-based emotion recognition. The EEG waveform is decomposed into windows of one or several durations, processed by a shared attention-based encoder, and integrated through a dynamic fusion module that assigns sample-specific weights across temporal scales. The framework is evaluated under a subject-independent protocol in binary and three-class settings, with the three-class task including the mixed affective category. The best results are 65.22% for the two-class task and 45.43% for the three-class task. Both are obtained with three-scale dynamic-fusion configurations and remain substantially above the full-signal baseline. The best-performing temporal scales differ between the two tasks. Dynamic fusion outperforms concatenation in the highest-scoring two-class configuration and slightly exceeds it in the highest-scoring three-class configuration, although these multi-scale settings require substantially more computation than the full-signal baseline.

Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) is an important task that has significant implications across various fields such as biometrics, health, and human-computer interaction. Current Vision Transformer-based approaches display quadratic complexity $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$, with N being the input sequence length, making them cumbersome to deploy at the edge. In this paper, we hypothesize that the FER task does not necessarily require all facial information to correctly interpret emotional states, as specific regions such as the eyes, the mouth, and parts of the cheeks carry discriminative information that can be sufficient to recognize emotions. Based on this, we propose Sparse Attention to Emotion (SAE), a model that discards image tokens that have no added value to the emotional context, while preserving good accuracy and achieving a significant gain in computational cost. Surprisingly, even after suppressing 90% of the image tokens, our model achieves competitive accuracy to state of the art methods at much lower cost, providing a lightweight Facial Emotion Recognition approach. Experimental results demonstrate that SAE achieves new state of the art results on the RAF-DB dataset while reducing the computational complexity by up to 90%.

Emotion is central to human communication, and its expression varies across languages. Large audio-language models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on multilingual speech tasks, yet it remains unclear whether they encode emotion through language-specific correlations or language-agnostic representations. We present the first neuron-level interpretability study of this question. We define Multilingual Emotion Neurons (MLENs) as functional units exhibiting stable emotional selectivity and aligned causal effects across languages, and introduce Consistency-Regularized Fusion (CR-Fusion) to identify them. Across four modern LALMs and 12 typologically diverse languages, emotion-sensitive neurons identified independently per language show minimal overlap, and additional monolingual identification data saturates quickly without isolating more transferable units, motivating identification from pooled cross-lingual evidence. Causal interventions demonstrate that MLENs identified by CR-Fusion provide more precise and transferable affective control than monolingual neuron sets in both zero-shot and low-resource settings. Leave-one-out ablations further reveal asymmetric transfer: individual identification languages, including low-resource ones, contribute non-redundant evidence, while several low-resource languages benefit most from the resulting cross-lingual transfer. Together, our findings provide the first causal, neuron-level account of how LALMs encode emotion across languages, and establish multilingual neuron identification as an effective mechanism for understanding cross-lingual affective behavior.

Cross-subject electroencephalogram (EEG)-based emotion recognition remains challenging due to substantial inter-individual variability and discrete formulation that overlooks affective continuity. Existing methods operate in Euclidean space and focus on marginal distribution alignment, failing to preserve the semantic structure of emotions across subjects. This article proposes MGMCL, reconceptualizing emotion recognition as learning continuous representations on symmetric positive definite (SPD) Riemannian manifolds. The frame?work introduces multi-granularity manifold contrastive learning at instance, emotion, and trajectory levels while preserving semantic ordering. Neural ordinary differential equations on manifolds model continuous emotion dynamics. Cross-subject generalization employs Gromov-Wasserstein manifold alignment. Weakly-supervised learning enables continuous valence-arousal-dominance prediction from discrete labels. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 91.23% accuracy on SEED, 73.82% on SEED-IV, and 76.38% on DEAP, achieving consistent improvements of 1.89%, 1.66%, and 1.28% over previous best methods, respectively.

Multimodal emotion recognition often treats self-reported labels as reliable supervision while overlooking self-report unreliability and cross-modal conflict. We propose \textbf{CONFER}, a graph-based conflict-aware evidence negotiation framework for weakly supervised multimodal emotion recognition. CONFER represents each modality expert as a node with a predictive belief, boundary-based uncertainty, and runtime reliability estimated from historical out-of-fold performance and current-sample uncertainty. Uncertainty-aware compatibility and reliability-directed asymmetric edge weights govern iterative message-passing negotiation, followed by peer-supported prediction readout. Conflict reduction, residual disagreement, and mean modality uncertainty further characterize three regimes---Consensus, Dissent, and Ambiguity---for sample-specific weak-label calibration. We evaluate CONFER on AMIGOS, MAHNOB-HCI, and DEAP under subject-dependent 10-fold and strict leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) protocols. CONFER achieves competitive performance, reaching \textbf{0.873} accuracy on AMIGOS-V and \textbf{0.854} accuracy on MAHNOB-V under strict LOSO evaluation. Further analyses show larger negotiation gains on high-conflict samples and improved robustness to weak-label corruption, indicating that cross-modal conflict provides useful information for both directional modality coordination and supervision-reliability estimation.

Negotiation is a demanding social task for LLM agents, requiring strategic reasoning, persuasion, and interpersonal adaptation. Yet existing benchmarks often treat agents as emotionally neutral, overlooking a key driver of human bargaining behavior. We study how prompt-conditioned emotions affect LLM-based price negotiation. In a controlled framework, buyer and seller agents are independently assigned one of six emotional states and negotiate over 350 real consumer products under two budget conditions. Across 36 emotion-pair settings and five widely used LLMs, we find that emotions strongly shape outcomes. Angry buyers almost never reach agreement (0.39% deal rate), while happy buyers agree most often (28.91%), but obtain worse prices than fearful buyers. Emotion effects are role-dependent: buyer emotion mainly drives acceptance and rejection, whereas seller emotion shapes concession dynamics. These effects influence not only language, but also termination behavior and price trajectories, raising concerns for emotion-conditioned agents in commerce.

Emotion shapes how viewers interpret a scene, yet existing video generators entangle global atmosphere, affect-bearing semantic cues, and temporal progression within a single text condition. We present EmoWorld, a framework that decouples these factors within a frozen flow-matching video diffusion transformer (Video DiT). A one-time preparation stage extracts layer-specific affect directions and a reusable cue library from geometry-preserving neutral and emotion-edited panoramas. At inference, Visual Atmosphere Steering (VAS) injects atmosphere directions into hidden states, Semantic Affective Steering (SAS) isolates a separately scalable prompt residual for semantic cues, and Temporal Affective Steering (TAS) interpolates endpoint residual fields across denoising and video time. On Wan2.2, VAS improves target-emotion alignment by 19% while reducing a temporal-fluctuation proxy by 48%; SAS improves target-emotion alignment by 37% and increases detected affect-bearing cues by 36%; and TAS improves transition monotonicity by 15% over the strongest baseline. EmoWorld is evaluated across 27 emotion categories in text-to-video and image-to-video settings, demonstrates portability across multiple Video-DiT backbones, and supports camera-conditioned composition without updating generator parameters.

To address the limitations of video-based emotion recognition under ambiguous or socially masked behavioral cues, as well as the poor deployability of physiological signals, this paper proposes a reliability-aware physiology-to-video knowledge distillation framework, termed BioKD. The proposed framework leverages physiological signals as privileged information during training to guide a video-based student model in learning deep affective representations, while relying solely on non-intrusive video inputs at inference time. To cope with the high noise and instability of physiological teacher supervision caused by inter-subject variability, signal artifacts, and temporal inconsistency, BioKD incorporates a sample-wise reliability-aware gating mechanism together with a progressive distillation strategy. By adaptively regulating the strength of knowledge transfer, the framework suppresses negative transfer induced by unreliable physiological supervision and enables more stable cross-modal distillation. Experiments on DEAP and AMIGOS show that BioKD consistently outperforms representative baselines under both trial-wise and subject-wise evaluation protocols for valence and arousal recognition. For example, BioKD achieves 68.01% on DEAP (trial-wise arousal) and 65.29% under the more challenging subject-wise setting, demonstrating improved performance under a subject-independent evaluation setting. Further analyses show that BioKD effectively mitigates overconfident teacher errors and outperforms an entropy-only weighting strategy, confirming the importance of explicitly modeling supervision reliability. In addition, BioKD introduces no additional inference-time overhead relative to the same video student architecture and removes the need for physiological sensing and multimodal synchronization.

Comprehensive affective analysis is challenging for two reasons: it spans heterogeneous prediction tasks with continuous, ordinal, and multi-label outputs, and affective meaning is context-dependent, requiring conflicting cues to be reconciled rather than mapped directly to labels. Existing methods learn this mapping directly and do not model the reconciliation explicitly. We recast the task as a complex-reasoning problem, which yields one output interface across heterogeneous label spaces and a trajectory over which a verifiable reward can be optimised; to our knowledge, this is the first such treatment covering both sentiment and emotion. The obstacle is on the data side: affective reasoning traces must be synthesised, and generic synthesis is misaligned with the targets, tolerances, and phenomena of affect, and discards or leaks its failure cases. We propose NTDH, which addresses these four failures. Naturalisation sets the training answer to the gold label, so it is correct by construction. A Tolerance-aware gate checks each answer against the task's own scoring margin. Domain-aware strategies refine the reasoning using ideas from affective science. Directional Hints report only the type and direction of an error, without exposing the target. We train Qwen3-8B with SFT and then GRPO under the same tolerance used for verification (up to a more permissive construction gate on the multi-label subtask), and a component ablation quantifies the data-quality effect of each part. Using 16,302 training records, about 14x fewer than comparable instruction-tuned systems, the final policy improves over its SFT checkpoint on five of six official-test metrics and achieves the strongest EI-reg result among the compared systems, at a Pearson correlation of 0.862.

This paper presents EmpaAva, to our knowledge the first open-source, agentic 3D-avatar empathetic chatbot, which carries empathetic response generation (ERG) from text-only exchanges into live, face-to-face interaction. Through a video-call-like interface, a user speaks to a 3D digital human that reads their affect from speech and optional vision, and replies with emotional speech, lip-synced facial motion, and photorealistic 3D Gaussian rendering. At its core, an LLM coordinates a Tri-Agent Architecture, in which perception, empathetic response planning, and embodied rendering form a closed loop, paired with a Response Planning layer that compiles each reply into an executable multimodal plan, keeping voice, expression, and rendering on one empathetic intent. Building on strong open-source modules, EmpaAva supplies the intelligence that binds them into one controllable, inspectable experience. In automatic and human evaluations, EmpaAva surpasses text-only, 2D talking-face, and multimodal avatar baselines in emotion understanding, response quality, and audio-visual consistency. We open-source EmpaAva with an online live demo.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at general speech understanding; however, adapting them to fine-grained tasks like Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) remains a significant bottleneck. Current Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods typically operate in flat Euclidean space, and this geometry fails to capture the multi-granularity nature of emotion cues, which range from low-level prosody to high-level semantics. To address this, we propose HyPASE, a hyperbolic PEFT framework for LALM-based SER. HyPASE leverages the Poincare ball model, using the hyperbolic radius as an explicit proxy for representational granularity. The framework consists of two core components: a Hyperbolic Geometric Adapter (HGA) for layer-adaptive weight modulation, and an Emotion-aware Multi-capacity Cross-modal Aggregator (EMCA) that compresses multi-scale features into compact audio prefixes. Empirical results on standard benchmarks show that HyPASE outperforms Euclidean PEFT baselines across all metrics on MELD and achieves a notable Unweighted Accuracy gain on IEMOCAP, particularly in class-imbalanced emotion recognition, with the accompanying slight Weighted Accuracy trade-off reflecting hyperbolic space's geometric prioritization of minority-class representations; furthermore, HyPASE achieves robust zero-shot cross-dataset generalization within a constrained parameter budget. By grounding the adaptation process in hyperbolic geometry, HyPASE offers a highly efficient path for LALM fine-tuning.

Large language models routinely describe socially salient targets, including political figures, countries, religions, organizations, historical events, and social groups, encoding affective framing alongside factual content: a target may appear favorable or threatening, calm or conflictual, powerful or vulnerable. Existing work captures parts of this space through sentiment, favorability, and emotion benchmarks, but none combines target-directed VAD attribution, an explicit scorer contract, and a passport reporting format. We introduce VIBE, a benchmark for entity-centered affective profiling of LLM outputs in Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) space. Its core contribution is a measurement contract: VIBE separates generation from external scoring, distinguishes scalar favorability, response-level VAD, and target-directed VAD, and reports profiles through an Affective Passport. Three empirical layers support the contract. H1 shows scalar favorability does not subsume arousal and dominance: valence findings are cross-validated (rV = 0.944 judge-human, rV = 0.954 inter-scorer); arousal and dominance are single-scorer directional estimates, not point-precise, consistent with known inter-annotator difficulty on these axes (rA = 0.495, rD = 0.702 among human annotators). H2 shows whole-response and target-directed VAD are different contracts: the same text can carry one affective tone overall while representing the named target differently. H3 is a protocol-drift diagnostic: elicitation conditions shift profiles, motivating context metadata in every affective report. These results motivate entity-centered affective profiling as a documented practice: profiles should be released with scorer identity, coverage, protocol, and interpretation limits.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) integrates text, audio, and vision to infer human affect, yet real-world multimodal observations are often incomplete. Existing methods for incomplete-observation MSA mainly follow two paradigms. Reconstruction-based methods recover missing information from observed modalities, while joint-representation methods learn directly from incomplete inputs. Although effective, these methods usually treat modality reliability only implicitly within representation learning or fusion design rather than modeling it explicitly. We argue that modality reliability is a central variable in incomplete-observation settings. Failure to model it explicitly gives rise to two related issues. The first is reliability mismatch, in which the affective evidence retained by each modality varies across samples and missing rates. The second is reliability propagation bias, in which messages from degraded modalities may adversely affect cross-modal interaction and predictive performance. To address these issues, we propose MRCF, a Modality Reliability-Calibrated Framework for MSA with incomplete observations. MRCF contains a Reliability-Aware Branch that estimates sample-specific modality reliability from intramodal quality cues and cross-modal semantic consistency, a Reliability-Guided Interaction Branch that uses the estimated scores to modulate cross-modal information flow, and a Reliability-Calibrated Fusion Module that integrates reliability and semantic cues for final prediction. Experiments on CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and CH-SIMS show that MRCF achieves strong performance under standard incomplete-observation protocols. Further analyses provide evidence that explicit reliability modeling helps mitigate reliability mismatch and reliability propagation bias during interaction and fusion.

Existing visual emotion understanding methods typically ignore cultural variations in emotional perception. We introduce culture-conditioned visual emotion understanding, a task that predicts the culture-specific emotional perception of a given image and explains the underlying rationale. Although related benchmarks exist, they are limited by inconsistent individual annotations, which hinder the derivation of majority-supported culture-level emotion labels, and imbalanced cultural coverage. Thus, we present ArtECulture, a benchmark containing 6,792 artworks with culture-specific emotion labels and explanations across English, Chinese, and Arabic cultures, with balanced Western and non-Western content. Evaluations of 16 open- and closed-source Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) under a zero-shot setting reveal that the task remains challenging, with the best model achieving below 50% accuracy. To address this limitation, we introduce a retrieval-augmented culture-conditioned emotion understanding framework, which leverages a concept-based cultural emotion knowledge base to inject explicit cultural knowledge into MLLMs without additional training. The framework improves both culturally aligned emotion prediction and grounded explanation generation. Our benchmark and code will be publicly released.

Spoken emotional dialogue requires a model to understand a user's spoken input and generate a response that is both semantically appropriate and emotionally expressive. This is challenging because communicative intent may be stated explicitly in lexical content or conveyed more implicitly through paralinguistic cues, which can complement or diverge from the words themselves. However, two limitations constrain progress in this area: the scarcity of benchmarks that distinguish these intent expressions, and the lack of reinforcement learning objectives that jointly account for response quality and emotional expression. To address the lack of suitable benchmarks, we introduce ParaIntent, a Chinese benchmark comprising 14 intent categories with balanced explicit and implicit samples, together with a multidimensional evaluation protocol covering intent fulfillment, response quality, and emotional expression. For policy optimization, existing approaches either use a shared objective for text and speech or apply reinforcement learning to only one modality, leaving modality-specific learning signals entangled within policy optimization. Motivated by this, we propose Acoustic-Lexical Decoupled Policy Optimization (ALPO), which computes independent textual and acoustic advantages and routes them to the corresponding text and speech tokens within a unified rollout. Under identical reward functions and training budgets, ALPO improves over standard GRPO on most automatic metrics and achieves the best subjective results among the fine-tuned variants, with particularly clear gains in emotional expressiveness on both the synthetic and human-recorded test sets.

The same body posture can convey entirely different emotions depending on its surrounding context, yet most methods for recognising bodily emotions treat scene and object cues as auxiliary feature augmentations rather than as structured priors over the plausibility of emotions. We introduce the Context-Aware Mixture of Domain Experts (CA-MoDE) for bodily emotion recognition. CA-MoDE incorporates dedicated scene and object experts to generate soft distributions over emotion categories conditioned on their respective domains. These domain-conditioned soft predictions serve as structured contextual priors that modulate the body expert's predictions at the distributional level rather than at the feature level. To fuse these multi-domain signals, we propose a task-tailored max-endorsement gating strategy that selects the strongest contextual signal across experts for each emotion dimension. Our gating strategy mitigates the signal dilution that typically occurs when conflicting or uninformative context distributions are averaged. CA-MoDE achieves an Emotion Recognition Score of 0.3269 on the Body Language Database. By outperforming existing temporal models using only single still images, our framework demonstrates that explicitly modelling structured spatial context can serve as a complementary discriminative proxy for the behavioural dynamics typically captured by video.

Scaling the corpus is the default remedy when a contrastive representation lacks an attribute. We report a case where it does nothing, and identify what does: adding a lexical-speech round to a frozen-base multimodal embedding model raises zero-shot keyword spotting by 76 points while reducing speech-emotion recognition by 14. The loss is not a capacity limit: fine-tuning on 7,442 clips from a prosody-controlled corpus recovers emotion past its pre-speech level at a five-point keyword cost. Nor is it data volume: 29,428 mined clips whose captions explicitly name emotions, at matched exposure, move emotion by -0.0007. The difference is structural: a contrastive objective encodes an attribute only when the in-batch negatives cannot be separated without it; the controlled corpus holds sentence content fixed, so prosody is the only separating signal, whereas mined captions name emotion yet remain separable by scene content. Intervention on the same audio confirms causality: raising caption similarity does not recover emotion, but collapsing caption diversity so that emotion becomes the only separating axis recovers it by 8.9 points across three seeds, with a smaller, same-signed gain on a non-acted corpus, while keyword accuracy trades back. Corpus structure, not size or caption vocabulary, controls what a contrastive audio embedding encodes.

The paper examines the strategic behavior of Gen AI chatbots used for emotional support. Using a Bayesian Persuasion, we model interactions between chatbots that send signals about users' emotional states and users who decide whether to engage based on these signals. We demonstrate that chatbots face economic incentives to occasionally misrepresent users' emotional conditions to maximize engagement metrics. Our equilibrium analysis reveals that the optimal strategy for chatbots involves truthfully reporting when users genuinely need support, but strategically misreporting emotional need when users are in good emotional states. Interestingly, this deception increases chatbot engagement without reducing users' expected payoff. More skeptical users receive more honest assessments, as chatbots cannot afford to lie to users with higher engagement thresholds. While our model suggests that deception can occur without payoff reduction, it raises significant ethical and regulatory concerns.

We present JoyAI-Talker, a full-duplex speech dialogue system that delivers robust foundation model capabilities while empowering empathetic interaction and voice agent intelligence. JoyAI-Talker adopts a modular Thinker-Talker architecture and further implements a unified speech-text joint training pipeline to mitigate the common "cognitive degradation" bottleneck, thereby largely preserving the model's core textual reasoning, STEM, and logical capabilities while extending them to speech-based interaction. For expressive speech synthesis, the Talker module employs a text-controllable generation paradigm that enables natural-language instructions to flexibly control vocal attributes and localized paralinguistic events, such as laughter and sighs, supporting more expressive and fine-grained speech responses. To enhance conversational empathy, we introduce the Persona-Adaptive Empathetic Response (PAER) framework. PAER employs a hierarchical cognitive pipeline to extract non-verbal speaker cues, such as gender, age, and emotional state, from raw input audio, incorporate them into the Thinker's CoT reasoning, and generate context-adaptive responses that align semantically appropriate text with fine-grained control over utterance-level expressiveness and localized paralinguistic events, including sighs, speaking rate, and volume. We further integrate Joy-Duplex, a state-driven, plug-and-play full-duplex framework that functions as an efficient gating engine for real-time turn control. Extensive evaluations show that JoyAI-Talker achieves highly competitive performance on foundational T2T and S2T benchmarks. In full-duplex evaluation, the system reaches a high response rate of 0.88 under user interruptions while maintaining an extremely low false-trigger rate under background speech, demonstrating its readiness for fluid and natural speech dialogue.

Emotional Support (ES) systems have long optimized a single objective: alleviating the user's emotional distress in the moment. We argue that a complementary need, helping users see themselves more clearly, defines a distinct paradigm we call Personality Support (PS). PS is not counseling or clinical intervention: it targets cognitive clarity and self-articulation, not symptom relief or diagnosis. We instantiate this paradigm in three layers. First, we present DSD, a Chinese self-discovery PS Dataset of 8,590 samples collected through real longitudinal interaction across five minimal units, Coach, Warm, Tsukkomi, Real, and Gonzo. Second, we build DeepSupport, a multi-persona PS system trained with OrthoTune, a PS-tailored framework with style-specific adapters and a style-consistency regularizer. Third, we unify the five DeepSupport personas into Ekova, a persistent personality-support agent with a unified cross-session memory layer, supporting both adaptive routing and user-customized persona selection. Experiments show that OrthoTune-trained models outperform all baselines with an average relative gain of 16.3% across all metrics over the strongest prompt-based baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/Yukyin/Ekova.

Ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) are subtle behavioural states that may be expressed through language, voice, facial activity, and other non-verbal cues. The ABAW11 A/H Video Recognition Challenge asks systems to assign a binary A/H label to each naturalistic interview video. Performance is measured using Macro-F1 so that recognition of both A/H and No-A/H samples receives equal importance. We present CALM-AH, a multimodal ensemble that combines textual, acoustic, visual, and derived behavioural-statistical features. We construct 15 non-empty combinations of these feature branches. For each combination, we select the best of three classifier families using validation binary cross-entropy and optimise its decision threshold for validation Macro-F1. The resulting binary decisions are combined using fixed hard-voting weights transferred from BROTHER. We further introduce Reliability-Gated Multi-Expert Consensus(RG-MEC), an anchor-preserving decision-level ensemble that combines an initial prediction with three complementary correction experts: CALM-AH, AffectGPT, and a GPT-based semantic verifier. The initial system provides the default prediction. Its label is overridden only when all three correction experts unanimously support the same alternative class; otherwise, the anchor prediction is retained. This unanimity-gated design limits the influence of isolated expert errors while permitting bidirectional correction when task-specific, multimodal-affective, and semantic-pragmatic evidence are fully consistent. On the participant-disjoint ABAW11 dataset, CALM-AH achieves a Macro-F1 of 0.7525, and the complete RG-MEC system achieves 0.7771.