The paper demonstrates that a single internal direction in modern language models—called the valence axis (V-axis)—captures how positive or negative a sentence feels. By using only nine emotion category names and 50 short narrative paragraphs per emotion, the authors identify this axis via principal component analysis of frozen encoder embeddings, achieving 93% of supervised performance on SST‑2 and strong correlations with human valence ratings across images, audio, and brain recordings. The method transfers across modalities without target‑modality labels, but works only for continuous attributes and is specific to certain model families.
By Yousef Radwan
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.
The paper introduces ‘One Model for All’, a universal pre‑training framework that tackles EEG‑based emotion recognition across diverse datasets and paradigms. It decouples learning into a univariate self‑supervised contrastive pre‑training stage using a Unified Channel Schema, followed by a multivariate fine‑tuning stage that employs an Adaptive Resampling Transformer and a Graph Attention Network to model spatio‑temporal dependencies. Experiments demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art performance on within‑subject benchmarks (SEED 99.27%, DEAP 93.69%, DREAMER 93.93%) and superior cross‑dataset transfer, with ablation studies highlighting the critical role of the GAT module.
By Xiang Li, You Li, Yazhou Zhang
arXiv:2606. 07707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decoding emotional states from neural signals has been typically framed as a discrete, single-label classification task based on emotionally stable stimuli, a formulation that oversimplifies the continuous, fluid, and co-occurring nature of human affect.
By Lemei Zhang, Peng Liu, Hans Dahle Kvadsheim, August S{\ae}tre Aasv{\ae}r, Shuer Ye, Reza Bonyadi, Maryam Ziaei, Jon Atle Gulla
arXiv:2605. 16739v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Decoding visual experience from brain activity has advanced substantially, but current brain-to-text systems largely recover semantic content while discarding affect.
By Bilal A. Mohammed, Lin Gu, Ruogu Fang
ProCA: Progressive Contrastive Alignment for Robust EEG Visual Decoding introduces a model‑agnostic framework that adaptively aligns EEG signals with visual semantics. It replaces fixed visual or textual anchors with EEG‑aware class‑level contrastive supervision and employs structure‑consistent interpolation to preserve channel‑wise and temporal importance. Across multiple evaluation settings—including subject‑dependent, subject‑independent, strict cross‑subject transfer, and continual adaptation—ProCA delivers significant performance gains, achieving relative Top‑1 improvements ranging from 7.4% to 28.1%.
By Kanglei Zhou, Chunyan Lan, Dongyang Li, Jun Zhu, Liyuan Wang
arXiv:2607. 04139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) shows strong potential for cross-dataset transfer by improving feature representation and generalization.
By Huqin Weng, Jiayang Huang, Yimin Wen, Jie Du, Chi-Man Vong, Chuangquan Chen
arXiv:2606. 26987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work identified emotion vectors in Claude Sonnet 4.
By Sinie van der Ben, Rapha\"el Baur, Yannick Metz, Mennatallah El-Assady
The paper introduces DAN, a training‑free inference‑time framework that improves affective reasoning in multimodal large language models. It combines a Hierarchical Emotional Reasoning Chain (HERC) to better capture fine‑grained visual cues and a Contrastive Discriminative Visual Pruning (CDVP) module to isolate discriminative tokens for semantically similar emotions. Experiments show significant gains, notably a +10.47% improvement on the WebEmo25 benchmark with Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct.
By Cheng Ye, Weidong Chen, Zhaobo Qi, Beier Zhu, Zhendong Mao
Sofroniew et al. (2026) showed that emotion concepts in Claude Sonnet 4.5 are encoded as vectors whose geometry mirrors human affect psychology. This study replicates that finding using the base pretrained model google/gemma-2-27b, generating 205,200 Claude Sonnet 4.5 stories, extracting 171 emotion vectors, and recovering a similar affective circumplex with principal components explaining comparable variance. The analysis further identifies a sharp geometric seam at layers 22‑26, demonstrates that much of the geometry already exists in static token embeddings, and shows that the geometry predicts token‑level co‑activation with high correlation.
By Adam Hollowell
The paper introduces a discriminative adaptation for SpeechLLMs that reads the hidden state of the final prompt token via a simple classification head, enabling emotion recognition in a single forward pass without altering the backbone. This approach replaces the generative decoder, which can produce out‑of‑set labels and favor frequent classes, with a controlled comparison between generative and discriminative inference. Experiments on IEMOCAP show improved Macro F1 scores, elimination of hallucinations, and larger gains on realistic ASR transcripts, while revealing that emotion directions encode indirect associations reflecting web‑scale text biases.
By Hasindri Watawana, Sergio Burdisso, Esa\'u Villatoro-Tello, Manjunath K E, Kadri Hacioglu, Petr Motlicek, Andreas Stolcke
The paper presents a reproducible single‑subject baseline for reconstructing visual stimuli from EEG using a temporal‑spatial convolutional encoder that maps averaged EEG signals to 512‑dimensional ViT-B/32 image features. On the THINGS‑EEG2 dataset, the model achieves 12.83%, 39.17%, and 58.00% image recall at ranks 1, 5, and 10, respectively, outperforming analytical chance levels. The study also shows that performance drops sharply when applying a model trained on one subject to others, and that direct conditional generators without external visual weights produce noise‑dominated outputs, indicating that only coarse semantic decoding is feasible under the tested protocol.
By Harshit Goyal