Affective Computing in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey from the NLP Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Yiqun, Yang, Xiaocui, Xu, Xingle, Gao, Zeran, Huang, Yijie, Mu, Shiyi, Feng, Shi, Wang, Daling, Zhang, Yifei, Song, Kaisong, Yu, Ge
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhang, Yiqun
Yang, Xiaocui
Xu, Xingle
Gao, Zeran
Huang, Yijie
Mu, Shiyi
Feng, Shi
Wang, Daling
Zhang, Yifei
Song, Kaisong
Yu, Ge
author_facet Zhang, Yiqun
Yang, Xiaocui
Xu, Xingle
Gao, Zeran
Huang, Yijie
Mu, Shiyi
Feng, Shi
Wang, Daling
Zhang, Yifei
Song, Kaisong
Yu, Ge
contents Affective Computing (AC) integrates computer science, psychology, and cognitive science to enable machines to recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotions across domains such as social media, finance, healthcare, and education. AC commonly centers on two task families: Affective Understanding (AU) and Affective Generation (AG). While fine-tuned pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved solid AU performance, they often generalize poorly across tasks and remain limited for AG, especially in producing diverse, emotionally appropriate responses. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) (e.g., ChatGPT and LLaMA) has catalyzed a paradigm shift by offering in-context learning, broader world knowledge, and stronger sequence generation. This survey presents an NLP-oriented overview of AC in the LLM era. We (i) consolidate traditional AC tasks and preliminary LLM-based studies; (ii) review adaptation techniques that improve AU/AG, including Instruction Tuning (full and parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA, P-/Prompt-Tuning), Prompt Engineering (zero/few-shot, chain-of-thought, agent-based prompting), and Reinforcement Learning. For the latter, we summarize RL from human preferences (RLHF), verifiable/programmatic rewards (RLVR), and AI feedback (RLAIF), which provide preference- or rule-grounded optimization signals that can help steer AU/AG toward empathy, safety, and planning, achieving finer-grained or multi-objective control. To assess progress, we compile benchmarks and evaluation practices for both AU and AG. We also discuss open challenges-from ethics, data quality, and safety to robust evaluation and resource efficiency-and outline research directions. We hope this survey clarifies the landscape and offers practical guidance for building affect-aware, reliable, and responsible LLM systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_04638
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Affective Computing in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey from the NLP Perspective
Zhang, Yiqun
Yang, Xiaocui
Xu, Xingle
Gao, Zeran
Huang, Yijie
Mu, Shiyi
Feng, Shi
Wang, Daling
Zhang, Yifei
Song, Kaisong
Yu, Ge
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Affective Computing (AC) integrates computer science, psychology, and cognitive science to enable machines to recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotions across domains such as social media, finance, healthcare, and education. AC commonly centers on two task families: Affective Understanding (AU) and Affective Generation (AG). While fine-tuned pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved solid AU performance, they often generalize poorly across tasks and remain limited for AG, especially in producing diverse, emotionally appropriate responses. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) (e.g., ChatGPT and LLaMA) has catalyzed a paradigm shift by offering in-context learning, broader world knowledge, and stronger sequence generation. This survey presents an NLP-oriented overview of AC in the LLM era. We (i) consolidate traditional AC tasks and preliminary LLM-based studies; (ii) review adaptation techniques that improve AU/AG, including Instruction Tuning (full and parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA, P-/Prompt-Tuning), Prompt Engineering (zero/few-shot, chain-of-thought, agent-based prompting), and Reinforcement Learning. For the latter, we summarize RL from human preferences (RLHF), verifiable/programmatic rewards (RLVR), and AI feedback (RLAIF), which provide preference- or rule-grounded optimization signals that can help steer AU/AG toward empathy, safety, and planning, achieving finer-grained or multi-objective control. To assess progress, we compile benchmarks and evaluation practices for both AU and AG. We also discuss open challenges-from ethics, data quality, and safety to robust evaluation and resource efficiency-and outline research directions. We hope this survey clarifies the landscape and offers practical guidance for building affect-aware, reliable, and responsible LLM systems.
title Affective Computing in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey from the NLP Perspective
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.04638