arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

Decoding Affective Nuances: Enhancing MLLMs via Hierarchical Emotion Reasoning and Contrastive Discriminative Pruning

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.

By Cheng Ye, Weidong Chen, Zhaobo Qi, Beier Zhu, Zhendong Mao
arXiv AI
4d ago

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.

By Jiale Dai, Liuxian Ma, Xiaoke Niu, Wenjing Zhang, Huiying Zhao, Zhaoxiang Liu, Shiguo Lian, Guojie Song