Affective Image Content Analysis (AICA) aims to recognize and understand emotions elicited by visual content, representing an indispensable step toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, despite the rapid progress of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), systematic evaluation of their visual emotional intelligence remains largely absent from recent model releases.
arXiv:2607. 10165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotion-aware artistic image generation requires an image to match the input prompt, follow the specified artistic style, and convey the target emotion.
By Dexiang Hong, Yijie Guo, Weidong Chen, Xinyan Liu, Zixuan Zou, Zhendong Mao, Yongdong Zhang
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: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
The paper "Forging Emotions" investigates how Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be used to generate images that convey or trigger specific emotions. It highlights that current datasets for high‑level concepts like emotions are inadequate and suggests incorporating psychological emotional networks into dataset construction. The study also finds that simple color cues are insufficient for affect generation, advocating for deeper analysis of GAN structure and composition to create genuinely emotive imagery.
By Amalia Foka
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
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
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:2610.16892v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Emotions are expressed on a continuum and are naturally described in the valence-arousal (VA) space. Existing VA-based image editors are typically...
By Harvey Mannering, Zhiwu Huang, Adam Pr\"ugel-Bennett
arXiv:2606. 13081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotion significantly influences cognition, enhancing memory and learning under certain conditions.
By Riccardo Emanuele Landi, Jo\~ao M. F. Rodrigues, Marta Chinnici
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
Composition, the deliberate arrangement of visual elements, is central to how meaning, emotion, and aesthetic quality are conveyed in artwork, yet it remains among the least formalized dimensions of visual understanding. Prior work highlights a persistent gap in learning meaningful compositional representations, attributing it to semantic bias and suggesting that human-inspired approaches may be key.