arXiv AI By Hao Li, Jinye Zhang, Bobo Li, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne Hsu, Zheng Wang, Hao Fei, Min Zhang

Cognition-Oriented Emotion Tracing from Causes to Consequences in Real-World Social Scenes

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The paper introduces TRACE, a cognition-oriented framework that models affective episodes as a sequence of Condition, Affect, and Effect stages, incorporating observable cues and cognitive factors like appraisal and regulation. TRACE-Bench evaluates multimodal models on five tasks—grounded affect recognition, regulation decoding, cause reasoning, effect reasoning, and full-chain reconstruction—using 3,746 question-answer pairs from 646 videos. The authors also present TRACER, a structured reasoning method that links each inference to explicit premises, achieving superior performance across all tasks compared to existing baselines.

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