LaScA: Language-Conditioned Scalable Modelling of Affective Dynamics

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Auteurs principaux: Pinitas, Kosmas, Maglogiannis, Ilias
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Pinitas, Kosmas
Maglogiannis, Ilias
author_facet Pinitas, Kosmas
Maglogiannis, Ilias
contents Predicting affect in unconstrained environments remains a fundamental challenge in human-centered AI. While deep neural embeddings dominate contemporary approaches, they often lack interpretability and limit expert-driven refinement. We propose a novel framework that uses Language Models (LMs) as semantic context conditioners over handcrafted affect descriptors to model changes in Valence and Arousal. Our approach begins with interpretable facial geometry and acoustic features derived from structured domain knowledge. These features are transformed into symbolic natural-language descriptions encoding their affective implications. A pretrained LM processes these descriptions to generate semantic context embeddings that act as high-level priors over affective dynamics. Unlike end-to-end black-box pipelines, our framework preserves feature transparency while leveraging the contextual abstraction capabilities of LMs. We evaluate the proposed method on the Aff-Wild2 and SEWA datasets for affect change prediction. Experimental results show consistent improvements in accuracy for both Valence and Arousal compared to handcrafted-only and deep-embedding baselines. Our findings demonstrate that semantic conditioning enables interpretable affect modelling without sacrificing predictive performance, offering a transparent and computationally efficient alternative to fully end-to-end architectures
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_07193
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LaScA: Language-Conditioned Scalable Modelling of Affective Dynamics
Pinitas, Kosmas
Maglogiannis, Ilias
Computation and Language
Emerging Technologies
Predicting affect in unconstrained environments remains a fundamental challenge in human-centered AI. While deep neural embeddings dominate contemporary approaches, they often lack interpretability and limit expert-driven refinement. We propose a novel framework that uses Language Models (LMs) as semantic context conditioners over handcrafted affect descriptors to model changes in Valence and Arousal. Our approach begins with interpretable facial geometry and acoustic features derived from structured domain knowledge. These features are transformed into symbolic natural-language descriptions encoding their affective implications. A pretrained LM processes these descriptions to generate semantic context embeddings that act as high-level priors over affective dynamics. Unlike end-to-end black-box pipelines, our framework preserves feature transparency while leveraging the contextual abstraction capabilities of LMs. We evaluate the proposed method on the Aff-Wild2 and SEWA datasets for affect change prediction. Experimental results show consistent improvements in accuracy for both Valence and Arousal compared to handcrafted-only and deep-embedding baselines. Our findings demonstrate that semantic conditioning enables interpretable affect modelling without sacrificing predictive performance, offering a transparent and computationally efficient alternative to fully end-to-end architectures
title LaScA: Language-Conditioned Scalable Modelling of Affective Dynamics
topic Computation and Language
Emerging Technologies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07193