arXiv Machine Learning

Audio emotion recognition for atypical hearing

The doctoral research investigates Audio Emotion Recognition (AER) for individuals with atypical hearing, specifically focusing on auditory hypersensitivity in people with autism. It proposes leveraging affective insights from acoustic traits and aims to generalize emotional responses from limited annotated data. The study begins by fine‑tuning the Contrastive Language‑Audio Pretraining (CLAP) foundation model using low‑rank adaptation (LoRA) on a valence and arousal dataset collected from neurotypical listeners.

arXiv AI
Oct 1

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."

By Yutong Hu, Jinho Choi
arXiv Computation and Language
5d ago

Incongruence-Aware Evaluation of Multimodal Speech Emotion Recognition in Audio Large Language Models

The paper introduces an incongruence score that quantifies disagreement between a speaker’s verbal content and vocal expression in a shared valence‑arousal‑dominance space, validated against human judgments. Using this metric, the authors evaluate three audio‑capable large language models across acted, conversational, and spontaneous speech datasets, finding that higher incongruence consistently increases error rates when audio is present. The study also shows that supervised classifiers behave oppositely, suggesting the challenge lies in how models fuse multimodal evidence rather than in the signal itself, and that the score remains predictive even without an emotion lexicon.

By Fengji Jing, Guy Laban
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 28

EmoNet: A Lightweight Attention-Based CNN for Speech Emotion Recognition

EmoNet is a lightweight attention‑based CNN framework designed for speech emotion recognition across seven categories. It combines a four‑block depthwise separable CNN encoder with squeeze‑and‑excitation attention, residual connections, a Bidirectional LSTM, and multi‑head attention pooling, using a 134‑channel acoustic feature set and data augmentation to enhance robustness. On a combined TESS, RAVDESS, and SAVEE dataset, EmoNet achieves 96.75% test accuracy with only 4.11 million parameters, outperforming a reproduced baseline and competing with larger state‑of‑the‑art models.

By Muhammad Moiz Khalid, Abdur Rehman Tariq, Muhammad Okasha Yamin
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