arXiv Computer Vision

What We Talk About When We Talk About Emotion Editing

The paper introduces ROI‑ReFT, a method for emotional image editing that leverages neural representations from fMRI encoding models to guide visual changes while preserving content. By combining source visual responses with predicted affective changes, the approach achieves high target‑emotion accuracy (91.75%) and joint success (83.25%) on a curated set of 400 editing requests. The authors plan to release their code and dataset publicly.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

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 image’s affective state and encodes the signed difference to guide a diffusion backbone that applies context‑dependent semantic and appearance changes. The authors created a large AffectPair‑249K dataset of source‑target pairs and show that AffectDelta outperforms six baselines in both affective alignment and content preservation, with ablation studies supporting their design choices.

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
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
Oct 9

VibeEdit: Image Editing with Canvas Instructions

VibeEdit is a new image‑editing tool that lets users draw spatial marks and add brief notes directly on an image to create a canvas instruction. These instructions guide the model to perform tasks such as adding, removing, replacing, or moving objects, as well as modifying attributes, without needing a separate text prompt. The system is trained on 1.55 million annotated edit pairs and uses a layer‑decoupled conditioning approach, achieving higher VLM rubric scores and PSNR on a benchmark that tests target selection among similar objects.

By Jinjing Zhao, Fangyun Wei, Yitong Wang, Xiuyu Wu, Yunuo Chen, Yang Yue, Sirui Zhang, Wenbo Wang, Hongyang Zhang, Dong Chen, Yan Lu, Chang Xu
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Interpreting and Enhancing Emotional Circuits in Large Vision-Language Models via Cross-Modal Information Flow

The paper introduces a steering‑vector‑based causal attribution framework to study how large vision‑language models (LVLMs) translate visual input into emotional narratives. By creating a specialized dataset, the authors uncover a functional decoupling in the LVLM’s three‑stage Adapt‑Aggregate‑Execute mechanism: visual emotional cues are first aggregated in middle layers via sentiment‑specific attention heads, then translated into narrative generation in deeper layers through emotion‑general pathways. Using these insights, they regulate emotional information routing to strengthen attention flow and amplify semantic activation, achieving significant performance gains on the MER‑UniBench and reducing emotional hallucinations through inference‑time intervention.

By Chengsheng Zhang, Chenghao Sun, Zhining Xie, Xinmei Tian
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Cognition-Oriented Emotion Tracing from Causes to Consequences in Real-World Social Scenes

The paper introduces TRACE, a cognition-oriented framework that models affective episodes as a sequence of Condition, Affect, and Effect stages, incorporating observable cues and cognitive factors like appraisal and regulation. TRACE-Bench evaluates multimodal models on five tasks—grounded affect recognition, regulation decoding, cause reasoning, effect reasoning, and full-chain reconstruction—using 3,746 question-answer pairs from 646 videos. The authors also present TRACER, a structured reasoning method that links each inference to explicit premises, achieving superior performance across all tasks compared to existing baselines.

By Hao Li, Jinye Zhang, Bobo Li, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne Hsu, Zheng Wang, Hao Fei, Min Zhang