arXiv Machine Learning

Cross-lingual Functional Vectors for Emotion Detection in Large Language Models

arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

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

The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle affective state reasoning, a type of implicit conversational state that persists across topic shifts. It introduces Self‑targeted Internal Attention Boosting (SIAB), a method that identifies and amplifies sparse affective attention heads using causal localization and the model’s own behavior, without relying on external labels. Experiments on ECC and GoEmotions datasets across multiple LLMs and prompting settings show that SIAB improves macro‑F1 scores by up to +10.3 points on ECC and +5.5 on GoEmotions, and further gains are achieved when combined with external supervision.

By Wenqiu Tang, Zhen Wan, Yihui Wang, Takahiro Komamizu, Ichiro Ide
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Some Emotions Run Deeper: Layer-wise Probing and Causal Intervention in Large Language Models

The study examines how emotions are represented across layers of large language models (LLMs) by probing eight 1B–9B open‑weight models on three datasets (Twitter, Reddit, autobiographical narratives). It finds that the optimal probing layer varies systematically with the dataset, moving from near‑input layers to deeper layers, and that targeted forward‑pass interventions on these layers degrade performance more than random interventions. Additionally, the selected layers transfer across datasets and emotion categories, and early‑exit representations from these layers outperform full‑depth exits by an average of 6.9 percentage points.

By Tian Fang, Ga\"el Guibon, Davide Buscaldi