arXiv Computation and Language

Functional Emotion Without Character: Large Language Models, Aristotelian Disposition, and the Limits of Behavioral Alignment

arXiv AI
Jul 1

Who Determines the Meaning of an Emotion? Affective Sovereignty as an Epistemic Consequence of Measurement Limits

arXiv:2606. 31442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Emotion-sensing AI is rapidly becoming embedded in vehicles, home appliances, dialogue agents, and social infrastructure, giving rise to a sphere in which emotion is no longer confined to individual experience but is instead observed and computed at a societal scale, a domain we term the Affectosphere.

By Keito Inoshita
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Replicating the Geometry of Emotion Representations in a Base Open-Weights Model

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
arXiv AI
Jul 3

Stabilising Generative Models of Attitude Change

arXiv:2604. 19791v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Attitude change - the process by which individuals revise their evaluative stances - has been explained by a set of influential but competing verbal theories.

By Jayd Matyas, William A. Cunningham, Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, Dean Mobbs, Edgar A. Du\'e\~nez-Guzm\'an, Joel Z. Leibo
arXiv AI
Jul 7

The Rise of Verbal Tics in Large Language Models: A Systematic Analysis Across Frontier Models

arXiv:2604. 19139v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve through alignment techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Constitutional AI, a growing and increasingly conspicuous phenomenon has emerged: the proliferation of verbal tics--repetitive, formulaic linguistic patterns that pervade model outputs.

By Shuai Wu, Xue Li, Yanna Feng, Yufang Li, Zhijun Wang, Ran Wang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 18

Language Has Two Parameters: Narrative-Induced Semantic Plasticity and Phase-Sensitive Interpretation

The paper argues that language operates with two parameters: amplitude, which measures how often words co‑occur, and phase, a signed relational factor that determines how co‑activated meanings combine and can reverse a meaning’s contribution. Unlike amplitude, phase is not captured by standard word embeddings or transformer attention weights and is indexed to individuals and dyadic interactions. The authors propose six empirical predictions to test phase’s role and suggest that future language models should incorporate agent‑indexed, phase‑bearing semantic states.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Faithful Action-unit Causal Reasoning for Counterfactually Faithful Emotion Explanations

arXiv:2606. 15779v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal models can name the action units (AUs) behind a facial emotion, but their AU->emotion rationales are typically plausible rather than faithful: nothing forces the AUs a model invokes to be the AUs that actually drive its prediction.

By Van Thong Huynh, Hong Hai Nguyen, Thuy Pham, Trong Nghia Nguyen, Soo-Hyung Kim