Empathic Prompting: Non-Verbal Context Integration for Multimodal LLM Conversations

We present Empathic Prompting, a novel framework for multimodal human-AI interaction that enriches Large Language Model (LLM) conversations with implicit non-verbal context. The system integrates a commercial facial expression recognition service to capture users' emotional cues and embeds them as contextual signals during prompting. Unlike traditional multimodal interfaces, empathic prompting requires no explicit user control; instead, it unobtrusively augments textual input with affective information for conversational and smoothness alignment. The architecture is modular and scalable, allowing integration of additional non-verbal modules. We describe the system design, implemented through a locally deployed DeepSeek instance, and report a preliminary service and usability evaluation (N=5). Results show consistent integration of non-verbal input into coherent LLM outputs, with participants highlighting conversational fluidity. Beyond this proof of concept, empathic prompting points to applications in chatbot-mediated communication, particularly in domains like healthcare or education, where users' emotional signals are critical yet often opaque in verbal exchanges.

Beyond Words: Enhancing Desire, Emotion, and Sentiment Recognition with Non-Verbal Cues

Desire, as an intention that drives human behavior, is closely related to both emotion and sentiment. Multimodal learning has advanced sentiment and emotion recognition, but multimodal approaches specially targeting human desire understanding remain underexplored. And existing methods in sentiment analysis predominantly emphasize verbal cues and overlook images as complementary non-verbal cues. To address these gaps, we propose a Symmetrical Bidirectional Multimodal Learning Framework for Desire, Emotion, and Sentiment Recognition, which enforces mutual guidance between text and image modalities to effectively capture intention-related representations in the image. Specifically, low-resolution images are used to obtain global visual representations for cross-modal alignment, while high resolution images are partitioned into sub-images and modeled with masked image modeling to enhance the ability to capture fine-grained local features. A text-guided image decoder and an image-guided text decoder are introduced to facilitate deep cross-modal interaction at both local and global representations of image information. Additionally, to balance perceptual gains with computation cost, a mixed-scale image strategy is adopted, where high-resolution images are cropped into sub-images for masked modeling. The proposed approach is evaluated on MSED, a multimodal dataset that includes a desire understanding benchmark, as well as emotion and sentiment recognition. Experimental results indicate consistent improvements over other state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of our proposed method. Specifically, our method outperforms existing approaches, achieving F1-score improvements of 1.1% in desire understanding, 0.6% in emotion recognition, and 0.9% in sentiment analysis. Our code is available at: https://github.com/especiallyW/SyDES.

EmoQ: Speech Emotion Recognition via Speech-Aware Q-Former and Large Language Model

The performance of speech emotion recognition (SER) is limited by the insufficient emotion information in unimodal systems and the feature alignment difficulties in multimodal systems. Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made progress in SER. However, MLLMs still suffer from hallucination and misclassification problems in complex emotion reasoning. To address these problems, we propose an MLLM-based framework called EmoQ, which generates query embeddings that fuse multimodal information through an EmoQ-Former and uses multi-objective affective learning (MAL) to achieve co-optimization. The framework also provides a soft-prompt injection strategy to inject multimodal representations into the LLM. This end-to-end architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets, providing a new multimodal fusion paradigm for SER.

Are Multimodal Foundation Models All That Is Needed for Emofake Detection?

In this work, we investigate multimodal foundation models (MFMs) for EmoFake detection (EFD) and hypothesize that they will outperform audio foundation models (AFMs). MFMs due to their cross-modal pre-training, learns emotional patterns from multiple modalities, while AFMs rely only on audio. As such, MFMs can better recognize unnatural emotional shifts and inconsistencies in manipulated audio, making them more effective at distinguishing real from fake emotional expressions. To validate our hypothesis, we conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis of state-of-the-art (SOTA) MFMs (e.g. LanguageBind) alongside AFMs (e.g. WavLM). Our experiments confirm that MFMs surpass AFMs for EFD. Beyond individual foundation models (FMs) performance, we explore FMs fusion, motivated by findings in related research areas such synthetic speech detection and speech emotion recognition. To this end, we propose SCAR, a novel framework for effective fusion. SCAR introduces a nested cross-attention mechanism, where representations from FMs interact at two stages sequentially to refine information exchange. Additionally, a self-attention refinement module further enhances feature representations by reinforcing important cross-FM cues while suppressing noise. Through SCAR with synergistic fusion of MFMs, we achieve SOTA performance, surpassing both standalone FMs and conventional fusion approaches and previous works on EFD.

Speech Emotion Recognition via Entropy-Aware Score Selection

In this paper, we propose a multimodal framework for speech emotion recognition that leverages entropy-aware score selection to combine speech and textual predictions. The proposed method integrates a primary pipeline that consists of an acoustic model based on wav2vec2.0 and a secondary pipeline that consists of a sentiment analysis model using RoBERTa-XLM, with transcriptions generated via Whisper-large-v3. We propose a late score fusion approach based on entropy and varentropy thresholds to overcome the confidence constraints of primary pipeline predictions. A sentiment mapping strategy translates three sentiment categories into four target emotion classes, enabling coherent integration of multimodal predictions. The results on the IEMOCAP and MSP-IMPROV datasets show that the proposed method offers a practical and reliable enhancement over traditional single-modality systems.

Social-MAE: A Transformer-Based Multimodal Autoencoder for Face and Voice

Human social behaviors are inherently multimodal necessitating the development of powerful audiovisual models for their perception. In this paper, we present Social-MAE, our pre-trained audiovisual Masked Autoencoder based on an extended version of Contrastive Audio-Visual Masked Auto-Encoder (CAV-MAE), which is pre-trained on audiovisual social data. Specifically, we modify CAV-MAE to receive a larger number of frames as input and pre-train it on a large dataset of human social interaction (VoxCeleb2) in a self-supervised manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this model by finetuning and evaluating the model on different social and affective downstream tasks, namely, emotion recognition, laughter detection and apparent personality estimation. The model achieves state-of-the-art results on multimodal emotion recognition and laughter recognition and competitive results for apparent personality estimation, demonstrating the effectiveness of in-domain self-supervised pre-training. Code and model weight are available here https://github.com/HuBohy/SocialMAE.

Beyond Emotion Recognition: A Multi-Turn Multimodal Emotion Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been widely applied across various fields due to their powerful perceptual and reasoning capabilities. In the realm of psychology, these models hold promise for a deeper understanding of human emotions and behaviors. However, recent research primarily focuses on enhancing their emotion recognition abilities, leaving the substantial potential in emotion reasoning, which is crucial for improving the naturalness and effectiveness of human-machine interactions. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a multi-turn multimodal emotion understanding and reasoning (MTMEUR) benchmark, which encompasses 1,451 video data from real-life scenarios, along with 5,101 progressive questions. These questions cover various aspects, including emotion recognition, potential causes of emotions, future action prediction, etc. Besides, we propose a multi-agent framework, where each agent specializes in a specific aspect, such as background context, character dynamics, and event details, to improve the system's reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, we conduct experiments with existing MLLMs and our agent-based method on the proposed benchmark, revealing that most models face significant challenges with this task.

LPGNet: A Lightweight Network with Parallel Attention and Gated Fusion for Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) aims to predict the emotional state of each utterance by using multiple input types, such as text and audio. While Transformer-based models have shown strong performance in this task, they often face two major issues: high computational cost and heavy dependence on speaker information. These problems reduce their ability to generalize in real-world conversations. To solve these challenges, we propose LPGNet, a Lightweight network with Parallel attention and Gated fusion for multimodal ERC. The main part of LPGNet is the Lightweight Parallel Interaction Attention (LPIA) module. This module replaces traditional stacked Transformer layers with parallel dot-product attention, which can model both within-modality and between-modality relationships more efficiently. To improve emotional feature learning, LPGNet also uses a dual-gated fusion method. This method filters and combines features from different input types in a flexible and dynamic way. In addition, LPGNet removes speaker embeddings completely, which allows the model to work independently of speaker identity. Experiments on the IEMOCAP dataset show that LPGNet reaches over 87% accuracy and F1-score in 4-class emotion classification. It outperforms strong baseline models while using fewer parameters and showing better generalization across speakers.

A Trustworthy Method for Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Existing emotion recognition methods mainly focus on enhancing performance by employing complex deep models, typically resulting in significantly higher model complexity. Although effective, it is also crucial to ensure the reliability of the final decision, especially for noisy, corrupted and out-of-distribution data. To this end, we propose a novel emotion recognition method called trusted emotion recognition (TER), which utilizes uncertainty estimation to calculate the confidence value of predictions. TER combines the results from multiple modalities based on their confidence values to output the trusted predictions. We also provide a new evaluation criterion to assess the reliability of predictions. Specifically, we incorporate trusted precision and trusted recall to determine the trusted threshold and formulate the trusted Acc. and trusted F1 score to evaluate the model's trusted performance. The proposed framework combines the confidence module that accordingly endows the model with reliability and robustness against possible noise or corruption. The extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed model. The TER achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Music-video, achieving 82.40% Acc. In terms of trusted performance, TER outperforms other methods on the IEMOCAP and Music-video, achieving trusted F1 scores of 0.7511 and 0.9035, respectively.

Arabic Multimodal Machine Learning: Datasets, Applications, Approaches, and Challenges

Multimodal Machine Learning (MML) aims to integrate and analyze information from diverse modalities, such as text, audio, and visuals, enabling machines to address complex tasks like sentiment analysis, emotion recognition, and multimedia retrieval. Recently, Arabic MML has reached a certain level of maturity in its foundational development, making it time to conduct a comprehensive survey. This paper explores Arabic MML by categorizing efforts through a novel taxonomy and analyzing existing research. Our taxonomy organizes these efforts into four key topics: datasets, applications, approaches, and challenges. By providing a structured overview, this survey offers insights into the current state of Arabic MML, highlighting areas that have not been investigated and critical research gaps. Researchers will be empowered to build upon the identified opportunities and address challenges to advance the field.