arXiv Computation and Language

Controllable Affective Generation via Latent Vector Steering

The paper introduces EmoVec, a lightweight framework that enables controllable affective generation in large language models by steering latent vectors. EmoVec identifies emotion-specific directions from paired neutral and emotion-conditioned responses using contrastive activation addition, then refines these directions through task-specific debiasing and principal subspace removal. During inference, the refined vectors are injected into the final residual stream with static or scenario-adaptive scaling, allowing continuous control over emotional intensity without updating model weights, and experiments across three LLMs and eight emotions demonstrate improved emotional salience while preserving semantic content, fluency, and coherence.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

EmoStance: Response-Side Affective-Orientation Control for Empathetic Response Generation via Emoji Weak Supervision

The paper introduces EmoStance, a method for controlling the affective orientation of empathetic responses in dialogue systems. It leverages weak supervision from multi‑annotator emoji distributions to create a latent control space that approximates listener stance, and uses a frozen instruction‑tuned LLM steered by continuous prefix embeddings. Evaluation shows a 62.2% decisive win rate over baselines, especially in contextual specificity and perceived responsiveness.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 11

E$^3$mo-Bench: A Scalable Benchmark for Multimodal Evoked and Expressed Emotion Understanding via Bayesian Pairwise Alignment

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.

arXiv AI
Sep 3

EmoStance: Response-Side Affective-Orientation Control for Empathetic Response Generation via Emoji Weak Supervision

The paper introduces EmoStance, a method for controlling the affective orientation of empathetic responses by leveraging weak supervision from emoji distributions. It builds the EmojiDialogue dataset, extending EmpatheticDialogues with emoji votes and confidence scores, and uses a frozen instruction‑tuned LLM steered by continuous prefix embeddings to generate responses that align with the listener’s stance. In blind pairwise evaluations, EmoStance achieves a 62.2% decisive win rate, notably improving contextual specificity and perceived responsiveness compared to baselines.

By Ziyuan Jin, Yuxuan Ge, Zheng Tian
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 Computer Vision
Sep 3

AffectDelta: Beyond Emotion Labels for Image Editing

AffectDelta is a new image editing framework that moves beyond single emotion labels by modeling edits as transitions between eight‑dimensional emotion distributions. It uses a frozen Emotion Distribution Predictor to estimate the source state and a signed difference vector to encode the desired change, which is then translated into context‑dependent semantic and appearance modifications via a transition encoder and a diffusion backbone. The authors introduce AffectPair‑249K, a dataset of 248,841 source‑target pairs covering both cross‑category and within‑category transitions, and show that AffectDelta outperforms six baselines in affective alignment and content preservation.

By Xingzu Zhan, Lin Gu, Ruogu Fang