arXiv AI

Beyond Text: LLM-Based Dimensional Emotion Evaluation in Multimodal Dialogue

The paper introduces an LLM-based framework for continuous dimensional emotion evaluation in multimodal dialogue, combining discrete emotion recognition with Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) assessment on the IEMOCAP dataset. It incorporates acoustic cues as natural language descriptions via the SpeechCueLLM approach and evaluates six models from the LLaMA, GPT, and Qwen families using zero-shot, few-shot, and LoRA fine-tuning. LoRA-fine-tuned LLaMA models outperform prompt-engineered GPT models, achieving a new state-of-the-art Valence CCC of 0.7822, and ablation studies show that textual audio descriptions significantly benefit smaller models. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that domain adaptation through fine-tuning can surpass larger GPT models in multimodal emotion evaluation, highlighting the importance of tailored training for emotion recognition tasks."

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

TalkFa: A Unified Benchmark for Farsi Dialogue Generation and Understanding

TalkFa introduces a unified benchmark for Farsi dialogue generation and understanding, comprising three datasets: WIKI‑FADIAL (4.2K Wikipedia‑grounded dialogues), DAILYDIALOG‑FA (6.6K dialogues with dialogue‑act and emotion annotations), and PLAYDIAL‑FA (2.1K theatrical dialogues with sentiment labels). All dialogues are curated through multi‑stage review by native speakers, ensuring high quality. Experiments show that LoRA fine‑tuning improves generation performance with less data, while specific models excel on classification tasks, and human evaluation confirms the benchmark’s reliability.

By Neda Jamshidi, Kamyar Zeinalipour, Fahimeh Akbari, Monica Bianchini, Marco Maggini, Marco Gori
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

Enriching Speech Emotion Representations with Conversational Context

The paper introduces ACERT, a module that incorporates a flexible-length window of conversational context to enhance Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). By capturing emotional evolution across utterances, ACERT outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on IEMOCAP, sets a new context‑aware benchmark on SAFE, and achieves strong results on MELD. Ablation studies attribute ACERT’s improvements to emotional and conversational continuity rather than speaker identity or acoustic conditions.

By Arthur Peuvot, Romaric Besan\c{c}on, Ga\"el de Chalendar, Bianca Vieru, Ioana Vasilescu
arXiv AI
Aug 25

DiaRelay: Relaying Dialogue Context with a Constant-Size Memory for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

DiaRelay introduces a lightweight adapter that lets large language models maintain a constant‑size dialogue‑level memory for emotion recognition in conversation. It builds on LoRA by adding a Selective Relay Memory Transition that aggregates useful historical evidence into a bounded memory, and a Dual‑axis Relay Memory Read that uses this memory to modulate low‑rank feature transformations. Experiments show DiaRelay achieves state‑of‑the‑art weighted F1 and accuracy on MELD with only 7.1 M additional trainable parameters, while also performing competitively on IEMOCAP.

By Zihao Zhou, Bin Yang, Jinghui Qin, Kebing Jin
arXiv AI
Sep 2

VoiceLongMemEval: Do Assistants Remember How You Sounded?

VoiceLongMemEval (VLME) is a new benchmark that tests AI assistants on their ability to remember how users sounded by incorporating paralinguistic metadata—such as emotion labels, prosody descriptors, and voice events—into each conversational turn. The benchmark uses a three‑stage adversarial gate to ensure that models cannot succeed with transcript alone, revealing a significant affect gap: models gain 0.09 to 0.38 accuracy when provided with paralinguistic cues, and audio‑native models outperform standard ASR pipelines in extracting these signals. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.

By Ramit Pahwa, Parivesh Priye, Apoorva Beedu