arXiv AI

VISTA: Value-Informed Event Appraisal for Multimodal Emotion Conflict

VISTA (Value-Informed Semantic Trust Arbitration) is a learned seven-field appraisal interface that conditions modality arbitration on concerns, event relations, and expression conditions while retaining a joint-evidence residual. It uses a log-odds decomposition to separate emotion expectation from cue diagnosticity, allowing appraisal to change how evidence is interpreted. With a shared Qwen2.5-Omni-7B backbone, VISTA achieves 64.5% conflict accuracy on CA-MER, improving on modality gating by 2.5 percentage points on conflict and 0.2 on consistency, and a frozen-backbone probe reaches 0.600 macro CCC for appraisal readout versus 0.505 for emotion-only fine-tuning.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Chiaroscuro for Emotions: A Contrastive Emotion Benchmark Grounded in Appraisal Theory

The paper introduces CHIARO, a 1,000-sentence benchmark for contrastive emotion inference grounded in appraisal theory, where each scenario elicits a positive emotion in one person and a negative emotion in another. The dataset covers ten emotion classes and is human‑annotated. Evaluation shows that the best large language model achieves 67.3 macro‑F1, below human agreement, while existing emotion classifiers perform near chance. When used as a training signal alongside an existing emotion corpus, models improve on CHIARO and on six of ten external emotion benchmarks, demonstrating its value as a complementary training resource.

By Divyesh Bommana, Mohammad Saim, Tianyu Jiang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

EmoMed: An Emotionally-Aware Agent for Multimodal Medical Support with Real-Time Information Retrieval

EmoMed is a multimodal medical consultation agent that tailors its responses to users' emotional states—such as anxiety, confusion, or urgency—while preserving clinical accuracy. It processes text and medical images, detects affect indicators, and adjusts tone, structure, and detail accordingly. The system ensures factual reliability through a dual retrieval mechanism that combines web-based fact‑checking with an API‑connected, continuously updated medical knowledge base, and it has been evaluated across seven state‑of‑the‑art language models using comprehensive metrics, showing that emotionally adaptive responses outperform neutral baselines without sacrificing accuracy.

By Ivan Nasonov, Nikita Glazkov, Ivan Makovetskiy, Mikhail Mozikov, Daniil Sukhorukov, Andrey Savchenko, Ilya Makarov
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

HUG-VIS: A Multimodal Benchmark for Human-centered Understanding and Generation in Visual Intelligence

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 Machine Learning
Jun 16

Faithful Action-unit Causal Reasoning for Counterfactually Faithful Emotion Explanations

arXiv:2606. 15779v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal models can name the action units (AUs) behind a facial emotion, but their AU->emotion rationales are typically plausible rather than faithful: nothing forces the AUs a model invokes to be the AUs that actually drive its prediction.

By Van Thong Huynh, Hong Hai Nguyen, Thuy Pham, Trong Nghia Nguyen, Soo-Hyung Kim
arXiv AI
Sep 4

EmoDistill: Offline Emotion Skill Distillation for Language Model Agents in Adversarial Negotiation

EmoDistill is an offline framework that distills emotional negotiation skills from large language model interactions into smaller agents. It separates emotion selection, handled by an Implicit Q‑Learning selector, from emotion‑conditioned expression, learned by a LoRA‑adapted 7B policy via supervised fine‑tuning and judge policy optimization. Experiments across four negotiation domains show that the full EmoDistill policy outperforms vanilla and IQL‑only baselines, while removing the explicit emotion channel markedly reduces negotiation utility and reveals partial, domain‑dependent transfer to unseen counterparties.

By Yunbo Long, Haolang Zhao, Lukas Beckenbauer, Liming Xu, Alexandra Brintrup