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.
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...
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:2608. 10448v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) requires understanding complex interactions between verbal and non-verbal cues.
arXiv:2609.36776v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Emotional Video Captioning aims to generate factually accurate and emotionally empathetic descriptions. While recent methods have recognized the import...
arXiv:2604. 15280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding emotions is a fundamental ability for intelligent systems to be able to interact with humans.
arXiv:2609.36563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual emotion recognition commonly assumes that all evidence required for prediction is contained in the observed image or video. Yet the same visible...
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.
AffectOmni is a reinforcement‑learning‑trained framework that enhances multimodal large language models for affective reasoning in social and art‑related scenes. It introduces People Focus and Temporal Order rewards to prioritize people‑centric cues and structured reasoning, and uses within‑group comparative scoring for more discriminative rewards. A Thinking Summarizer converts rationales into executable evidence instructions, which are grounded into pixel‑level regions via SAM3, enabling external auditability.
arXiv:2607. 21013v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive performance in multimodal emotion recognition (MER) tasks and lifted MER to a new level that is complex emotion understanding with advanced video understanding abilities and natural language description.
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: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.
arXiv:2607. 12787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly improved the performance of multimodal emotion recognition (MER) and enabled interpretable description generation by jointly modeling video, audio, and language, etc.