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:2602. 23802v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in visual reasoning and understanding tasks but still struggle to capture the complexity and subjectivity of human emotions.
By Yiyang Fang, Wenke Huang, Pei Fu, Yihao Yang, Kehua Su, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan, Mang Ye
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.
arXiv:2609.36775v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning has significantly advanced the complex reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. However, prevailing RL algorithms suffer a severe failur...
By Cheng Ye, Weidong Chen, Bingyan Xu, Zhendong Mao
HUG‑VIS is a unified multimodal benchmark for human‑centered visual intelligence, comprising 8,400 half‑body videos of 30 professional actors performing 280 emotion‑action prompts in Mandarin. The dataset provides synchronized video, audio, text, and alpha mattes for four tasks—human emotion recognition, video generation, voice cloning, and video matting—allowing evaluation of both open‑ and closed‑source models under a zero‑shot protocol. Results reveal that linguistic cues dominate emotion recognition, visual affect is weakest, and that automatic metrics and human judgments diverge in generation and cloning tasks, while motion‑related boundary fidelity remains a key challenge for matting.
By Fei Ma, Zebang Cheng, Minghui Li, Hongbo Xu, Yuyong Tan, Yihua Shao, Hanling Wang, Zhou Liu, Yuqing Gao, Dong Wang, Long Ma, Laizhong Cui, Nicu Sebe, Qi Tian
arXiv:2604. 15280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding emotions is a fundamental ability for intelligent systems to be able to interact with humans.
By Madhav Agarwal, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Laura Sevilla-Lara, Steven McDonagh