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arXiv Computation and Language By Wenqiu Tang, Zhen Wan, Yihui Wang, Takahiro Komamizu, Ichiro Ide

Emotion Is Not External Knowledge: Internal Attention Signals for Affective State Reasoning

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The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle affective state reasoning, a type of implicit conversational state that persists across topic shifts. It introduces Self‑targeted Internal Attention Boosting (SIAB), a method that identifies and amplifies sparse affective attention heads using causal localization and the model’s own behavior, without relying on external labels. Experiments on ECC and GoEmotions datasets across multiple LLMs and prompting settings show that SIAB improves macro‑F1 scores by up to +10.3 points on ECC and +5.5 on GoEmotions, and further gains are achieved when combined with external supervision.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computation and Language.

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