arXiv Machine Learning By Sukru Samet Dindar, Riki Shimizu, Xilin Jiang, Nima Mesgarani

Sympatheia: Emotionally Adaptive Voice Assistant with Continuous Affect Conditioning

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

arXiv:2606. 00851v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Empathetic spoken dialogue systems must infer a user's emotional state to respond appropriately, yet everyday speech often carries weak, neutral, or ambiguous affective cues.

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 Machine Learning.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

Enriching Speech Emotion Representations with Conversational Context

The paper introduces ACERT, a module that incorporates a flexible-length window of conversational context to enhance Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). By capturing emotional evolution across utterances, ACERT outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on IEMOCAP, sets a new context‑aware benchmark on SAFE, and achieves strong results on MELD. Ablation studies attribute ACERT’s improvements to emotional and conversational continuity rather than speaker identity or acoustic conditions.

By Arthur Peuvot, Romaric Besan\c{c}on, Ga\"el de Chalendar, Bianca Vieru, Ioana Vasilescu
arXiv AI
3d ago

Beyond Text: LLM-Based Dimensional Emotion Evaluation in Multimodal Dialogue

The paper introduces an LLM-based framework for continuous dimensional emotion evaluation in multimodal dialogue, combining discrete emotion recognition with Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) assessment on the IEMOCAP dataset. It incorporates acoustic cues as natural language descriptions via the SpeechCueLLM approach and evaluates six models from the LLaMA, GPT, and Qwen families using zero-shot, few-shot, and LoRA fine-tuning. LoRA-fine-tuned LLaMA models outperform prompt-engineered GPT models, achieving a new state-of-the-art Valence CCC of 0.7822, and ablation studies show that textual audio descriptions significantly benefit smaller models. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that domain adaptation through fine-tuning can surpass larger GPT models in multimodal emotion evaluation, highlighting the importance of tailored training for emotion recognition tasks."

By Yutong Hu, Jinho Choi