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:2609.36563v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Visual emotion recognition commonly assumes that all evidence required for prediction is contained in the observed image or video. Yet the same visible...
By Yihao Qian, Runhao Zeng, Sicheng Zhao, Feng Liang, Hongmin Cai, Mingkui Tan
The paper introduces a steering‑vector‑based causal attribution framework to study how large vision‑language models (LVLMs) translate visual input into emotional narratives. By creating a specialized dataset, the authors uncover a functional decoupling in the LVLM’s three‑stage Adapt‑Aggregate‑Execute mechanism: visual emotional cues are first aggregated in middle layers via sentiment‑specific attention heads, then translated into narrative generation in deeper layers through emotion‑general pathways. Using these insights, they regulate emotional information routing to strengthen attention flow and amplify semantic activation, achieving significant performance gains on the MER‑UniBench and reducing emotional hallucinations through inference‑time intervention.
By Chengsheng Zhang, Chenghao Sun, Zhining Xie, Xinmei Tian
In this paper, we present the solution developed by our team, XInsight Lab, which achieved first place in Track 3 of the 4th EI-MIGA-IJCAI Challenge with a test accuracy of 0. 76923.
arXiv:2609.36776v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Emotional Video Captioning aims to generate factually accurate and emotionally empathetic descriptions. While recent methods have recognized the import...
By Cheng Ye, Weidong Chen, Peipei Song, Zhendong Mao
Affective Image Content Analysis (AICA) aims to recognize and understand emotions elicited by visual content, representing an indispensable step toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, despite the rapid progress of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), systematic evaluation of their visual emotional intelligence remains largely absent from recent model releases.