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.
arXiv:2601. 00181v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We address two persistent gaps in Emotion Recognition in Conversation: which modeling choices materially affect performance, and how recognition findings connect to interpretable discourse-level patterns.
arXiv:2606. 26987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work identified emotion vectors in Claude Sonnet 4.
arXiv:2608.29613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Function vectors (FVs) have recently emerged as a promising mechanism for steering the behavior of large language models (LLMs) by injecting task-spe...
arXiv:2606. 29068v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text encoders are known for their utility in natural language processing, as they are able to efficiently compress inputs into dense vectors while preserving semantics.
arXiv:2606. 27717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prosodic emphasis varies across languages, emotions, and speaking styles, yet existing emphasis detection models are largely trained and evaluated on monolingual neutral read speech.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 00129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful representation learners whose internal features increasingly align with human cognition.
arXiv:2608. 03810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models routinely describe socially salient targets, including political figures, countries, religions, organizations, historical events, and social groups, encoding affective framing alongside factual content: a target may appear favorable or threatening, calm or conflictual, powerful or vulnerable.
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.
DiaRelay introduces a lightweight adapter that lets large language models maintain a constant‑size dialogue‑level memory for emotion recognition in conversation. It builds on LoRA by adding a Selective Relay Memory Transition that aggregates useful historical evidence into a bounded memory, and a Dual‑axis Relay Memory Read that uses this memory to modulate low‑rank feature transformations. Experiments show DiaRelay achieves state‑of‑the‑art weighted F1 and accuracy on MELD with only 7.1 M additional trainable parameters, while also performing competitively on IEMOCAP.
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.