The paper demonstrates that a single internal direction in modern language models—called the valence axis (V-axis)—captures how positive or negative a sentence feels. By using only nine emotion category names and 50 short narrative paragraphs per emotion, the authors identify this axis via principal component analysis of frozen encoder embeddings, achieving 93% of supervised performance on SST‑2 and strong correlations with human valence ratings across images, audio, and brain recordings. The method transfers across modalities without target‑modality labels, but works only for continuous attributes and is specific to certain model families.
By Yousef Radwan
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.
The paper introduces ‘One Model for All’, a universal pre‑training framework that tackles EEG‑based emotion recognition across diverse datasets and paradigms. It decouples learning into a univariate self‑supervised contrastive pre‑training stage using a Unified Channel Schema, followed by a multivariate fine‑tuning stage that employs an Adaptive Resampling Transformer and a Graph Attention Network to model spatio‑temporal dependencies. Experiments demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art performance on within‑subject benchmarks (SEED 99.27%, DEAP 93.69%, DREAMER 93.93%) and superior cross‑dataset transfer, with ablation studies highlighting the critical role of the GAT module.
By Xiang Li, You Li, Yazhou Zhang
arXiv:2606. 07707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decoding emotional states from neural signals has been typically framed as a discrete, single-label classification task based on emotionally stable stimuli, a formulation that oversimplifies the continuous, fluid, and co-occurring nature of human affect.
By Lemei Zhang, Peng Liu, Hans Dahle Kvadsheim, August S{\ae}tre Aasv{\ae}r, Shuer Ye, Reza Bonyadi, Maryam Ziaei, Jon Atle Gulla
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.
By Bilal A. Mohammed, Lin Gu, Ruogu Fang
ProCA: Progressive Contrastive Alignment for Robust EEG Visual Decoding introduces a model‑agnostic framework that adaptively aligns EEG signals with visual semantics. It replaces fixed visual or textual anchors with EEG‑aware class‑level contrastive supervision and employs structure‑consistent interpolation to preserve channel‑wise and temporal importance. Across multiple evaluation settings—including subject‑dependent, subject‑independent, strict cross‑subject transfer, and continual adaptation—ProCA delivers significant performance gains, achieving relative Top‑1 improvements ranging from 7.4% to 28.1%.
By Kanglei Zhou, Chunyan Lan, Dongyang Li, Jun Zhu, Liyuan Wang