arXiv:2606. 00129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful representation learners whose internal features increasingly align with human cognition.
By Yousef A. Radwan, Xuhui Liu, Kilichbek Haydarov, Yuqian Fu, Mohamed Elhoseiny
Sofroniew et al. (2026) showed that emotion concepts in Claude Sonnet 4.5 are encoded as vectors whose geometry mirrors human affect psychology. This study replicates that finding using the base pretrained model google/gemma-2-27b, generating 205,200 Claude Sonnet 4.5 stories, extracting 171 emotion vectors, and recovering a similar affective circumplex with principal components explaining comparable variance. The analysis further identifies a sharp geometric seam at layers 22‑26, demonstrates that much of the geometry already exists in static token embeddings, and shows that the geometry predicts token‑level co‑activation with high correlation.
By Adam Hollowell
The paper introduces EmoNet‑Face‑HQ, a fine‑grained emotion recognition benchmark that uses generated portraits and a 40‑category taxonomy to evaluate vision‑language models (VLMs). It finds that VLMs perform poorly when asked to generate responses but can match or surpass a fine‑tuned model (Empathic‑Insight‑Face) when their logits are read directly as binary queries. The study shows that the benchmark’s difficulty lies in the readout process rather than in perception, and that graded probability outputs yield better performance than simple yes/no questions.
By Tobias Hallmen, Fabian Deuser, Robin-Nico Kampa, Norbert Oswald, Elisabeth Andr\'e
arXiv:2606. 26987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work identified emotion vectors in Claude Sonnet 4.
By Sinie van der Ben, Rapha\"el Baur, Yannick Metz, Mennatallah El-Assady
arXiv:2609.38157v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Emotion-conditioned text-to-speech (TTS) models may fail to express the requested emotion reliably, and improving controllability by additional train...
By Kuan-Po Huang, Haohe Liu, Puyuan Peng, Haibin Wu, Zhaoheng Ni, Hung-yi Lee, Jinwon Lee, Neha Chachra
The study examines how emotions are represented across layers of large language models (LLMs) by probing eight 1B–9B open‑weight models on three datasets (Twitter, Reddit, autobiographical narratives). It finds that the optimal probing layer varies systematically with the dataset, moving from near‑input layers to deeper layers, and that targeted forward‑pass interventions on these layers degrade performance more than random interventions. Additionally, the selected layers transfer across datasets and emotion categories, and early‑exit representations from these layers outperform full‑depth exits by an average of 6.9 percentage points.
By Tian Fang, Ga\"el Guibon, Davide Buscaldi