AffectGPT-R1: Leveraging Reinforcement Learning for Open-Vocabulary Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lian, Zheng, Zhang, Fan, Zhang, Yazhou, Tao, Jianhua, Liu, Rui, Chen, Haoyu, Li, Xiaobai, He, Bin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lian, Zheng
Zhang, Fan
Zhang, Yazhou
Tao, Jianhua
Liu, Rui
Chen, Haoyu
Li, Xiaobai
He, Bin
author_facet Lian, Zheng
Zhang, Fan
Zhang, Yazhou
Tao, Jianhua
Liu, Rui
Chen, Haoyu
Li, Xiaobai
He, Bin
contents Open-Vocabulary Multimodal Emotion Recognition (OV-MER) aims to predict emotions without being constrained by label spaces, enabling fine-grained emotion understanding. Unlike traditional discriminative methods, OV-MER leverages generative models to capture the full spectrum of emotions and employs emotion wheels (EWs) for metric calculation. Previous approaches (e.g., AffectGPT) primarily rely on token-level loss during training. However, this objective is misaligned with the metrics used in OV-MER, while these metrics cannot be optimized via gradient backpropagation. To address this limitation, we propose AffectGPT-R1, a reinforcement learning framework that treats EW-based metrics as a reward function and applies policy optimization to maximize this reward. Additionally, we introduce an explicit reasoning process and examine its necessity in OV-MER. To further guide model behavior, we incorporate auxiliary rewards that regularize both emotion reasoning and emotion prediction. We also apply length penalties to mitigate reward hacking. Experimental results demonstrate that AffectGPT-R1 yields significant performance improvements on OV-MER. Moreover, our approach enhances generalized emotion understanding, achieving state-of-the-art results on MER-UniBench. Our code is provided in the supplementary material and will be released to facilitate future research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_01318
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AffectGPT-R1: Leveraging Reinforcement Learning for Open-Vocabulary Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Lian, Zheng
Zhang, Fan
Zhang, Yazhou
Tao, Jianhua
Liu, Rui
Chen, Haoyu
Li, Xiaobai
He, Bin
Human-Computer Interaction
Open-Vocabulary Multimodal Emotion Recognition (OV-MER) aims to predict emotions without being constrained by label spaces, enabling fine-grained emotion understanding. Unlike traditional discriminative methods, OV-MER leverages generative models to capture the full spectrum of emotions and employs emotion wheels (EWs) for metric calculation. Previous approaches (e.g., AffectGPT) primarily rely on token-level loss during training. However, this objective is misaligned with the metrics used in OV-MER, while these metrics cannot be optimized via gradient backpropagation. To address this limitation, we propose AffectGPT-R1, a reinforcement learning framework that treats EW-based metrics as a reward function and applies policy optimization to maximize this reward. Additionally, we introduce an explicit reasoning process and examine its necessity in OV-MER. To further guide model behavior, we incorporate auxiliary rewards that regularize both emotion reasoning and emotion prediction. We also apply length penalties to mitigate reward hacking. Experimental results demonstrate that AffectGPT-R1 yields significant performance improvements on OV-MER. Moreover, our approach enhances generalized emotion understanding, achieving state-of-the-art results on MER-UniBench. Our code is provided in the supplementary material and will be released to facilitate future research.
title AffectGPT-R1: Leveraging Reinforcement Learning for Open-Vocabulary Multimodal Emotion Recognition
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01318