Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Emotion Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Bhattacharyya, Sree, Wang, James Z.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Bhattacharyya, Sree
Wang, James Z.
author_facet Bhattacharyya, Sree
Wang, James Z.
contents Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved unprecedented success in several objective multimodal reasoning tasks. However, to further enhance their capabilities of empathetic and effective communication with humans, improving how VLMs process and understand emotions is crucial. Despite significant research attention on improving affective understanding, there is a lack of detailed evaluations of VLMs for emotion-related tasks, which can potentially help inform downstream fine-tuning efforts. In this work, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of VLMs for recognizing evoked emotions from images. We create a benchmark for the task of evoked emotion recognition and study the performance of VLMs for this task, from perspectives of correctness and robustness. Through several experiments, we demonstrate important factors that emotion recognition performance depends on, and also characterize the various errors made by VLMs in the process. Finally, we pinpoint potential causes for errors through a human evaluation study. We use our experimental results to inform recommendations for the future of emotion research in the context of VLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05660
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Emotion Recognition
Bhattacharyya, Sree
Wang, James Z.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved unprecedented success in several objective multimodal reasoning tasks. However, to further enhance their capabilities of empathetic and effective communication with humans, improving how VLMs process and understand emotions is crucial. Despite significant research attention on improving affective understanding, there is a lack of detailed evaluations of VLMs for emotion-related tasks, which can potentially help inform downstream fine-tuning efforts. In this work, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of VLMs for recognizing evoked emotions from images. We create a benchmark for the task of evoked emotion recognition and study the performance of VLMs for this task, from perspectives of correctness and robustness. Through several experiments, we demonstrate important factors that emotion recognition performance depends on, and also characterize the various errors made by VLMs in the process. Finally, we pinpoint potential causes for errors through a human evaluation study. We use our experimental results to inform recommendations for the future of emotion research in the context of VLMs.
title Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Emotion Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05660