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
arXiv:2602. 23802v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in visual reasoning and understanding tasks but still struggle to capture the complexity and subjectivity of human emotions.
By Yiyang Fang, Wenke Huang, Pei Fu, Yihao Yang, Kehua Su, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan, Mang Ye
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:2609.36775v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning has significantly advanced the complex reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. However, prevailing RL algorithms suffer a severe failur...
By Cheng Ye, Weidong Chen, Bingyan Xu, Zhendong Mao
HUG‑VIS is a unified multimodal benchmark for human‑centered visual intelligence, comprising 8,400 half‑body videos of 30 professional actors performing 280 emotion‑action prompts in Mandarin. The dataset provides synchronized video, audio, text, and alpha mattes for four tasks—human emotion recognition, video generation, voice cloning, and video matting—allowing evaluation of both open‑ and closed‑source models under a zero‑shot protocol. Results reveal that linguistic cues dominate emotion recognition, visual affect is weakest, and that automatic metrics and human judgments diverge in generation and cloning tasks, while motion‑related boundary fidelity remains a key challenge for matting.
By Fei Ma, Zebang Cheng, Minghui Li, Hongbo Xu, Yuyong Tan, Yihua Shao, Hanling Wang, Zhou Liu, Yuqing Gao, Dong Wang, Long Ma, Laizhong Cui, Nicu Sebe, Qi Tian
arXiv:2604. 15280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding emotions is a fundamental ability for intelligent systems to be able to interact with humans.
By Madhav Agarwal, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Laura Sevilla-Lara, Steven McDonagh
arXiv:2609.24215v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Although text-to-image models can accurately depict subjects and scenes, creators still struggle to specify the fine-grained emotions an image should c...
By Minglang Li, Yueyue Fang, Xieping Gao
arXiv:2607. 10678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Emotional intelligence enables humans to recognize emotions, infer their causes, reason about interventions, and modify their environment to achieve desired affective states.
By Qing Lin, Mengmi Zhang
VKnowU is a benchmark that tests multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on their grasp of visual knowledge—intuitive, human-like understanding of physical and social principles in videos. The benchmark contains 1,680 questions across 1,249 videos, covering eight core types of visual knowledge, and shows that current state‑of‑the‑art MLLMs still lag behind human performance, especially on world‑centric tasks. To address this gap, the authors release VKnowQA and VideoKnow+, a baseline model that incorporates visual knowledge via a See‑Think‑Answer framework and reinforcement learning, improving performance on VKnowU and related datasets.
By Tianxiang Jiang, Sheng Xia, Yicheng Xu, Linquan Wu, Xiangyu Zeng, Limin Wang, Yu Qiao, Yi Wang
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: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
arXiv:2508. 17298v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Compositional visual reasoning has emerged as a key research frontier in multimodal AI, aiming to endow machines with the human-like ability to decompose visual scenes, ground intermediate concepts, and perform multi-step logical inference.
By Fucai Ke, Joy Hsu, Zhixi Cai, Zixian Ma, Xin Zheng, Xindi Wu, Sukai Huang, Weiqing Wang, Pari Delir Haghighi, Gholamreza Haffari, Ranjay Krishna, Jiajun Wu, Hamid Rezatofighi