AffToM is a new benchmark for affective Theory of Mind (ToM) in dynamic multi‑party interactions, comprising 1,922 test pairs and 19,759 training pairs. It evaluates Individual Affective Reasoning (IAR) and Multi‑party Affective Reasoning (MPAR), the latter tracking nested beliefs and emotions as events unfold. The authors introduce an event‑driven multi‑agent generation pipeline and a two‑stage post‑training framework, AffToM‑R1, which boosts MPAR accuracy by 13.38 percentage points over baseline models.
arXiv:2608. 10448v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) requires understanding complex interactions between verbal and non-verbal cues.
arXiv:2609.40079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in affective computing, their reasoning capabilities are largely confined to...
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.
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: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.
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.
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.
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.
The paper introduces CASE, a Confusion-Aware Skill Evolution framework designed to improve Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) by addressing systematic confusion between semantically adjacent emotions. CASE builds a sparse, self‑evolving library of pair‑specific EmotionSkills that externalize affective expertise from frozen multimodal large language model (MLLM) backbones, allowing continuous refinement and transfer across different models. Experiments on CA‑MER, DFEW, and EMER benchmarks show that CASE significantly boosts accuracy, notably raising Qwen3‑VL‑8B’s performance from 46.80% to 59.13%.
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...
arXiv:2609.13240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The AffectiveArt Multidimensional Art Emotion Understanding task asks to jointly predict an artwork's fine-grained emotion (12 classes, 1549:1 head-to-...
The paper proposes an agentic framework for multimodal emotion reasoning that uses frozen models to avoid costly instruction tuning. It employs modality‑specific perception agents, an integration agent, and an MLLM critic to generate emotion predictions with evidence citations, followed by an evidence‑grounded verification stage that identifies errors and applies targeted prompt patches without updating model weights. On the MER2025 dataset, this approach improves F‑score across several large language‑vision models, outperforming static pipelines and matching or exceeding reflection baselines.