MultiEmo-Bench: Multi-label Visual Emotion Analysis for Multi-modal Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chen, Tianwei, Furusawa, Takuya, Hirakawa, Yuki, Shimizu, Ryotaro, Fan, Mo, Wada, Takashi
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Chen, Tianwei
Furusawa, Takuya
Hirakawa, Yuki
Shimizu, Ryotaro
Fan, Mo
Wada, Takashi
author_facet Chen, Tianwei
Furusawa, Takuya
Hirakawa, Yuki
Shimizu, Ryotaro
Fan, Mo
Wada, Takashi
contents This paper introduces a multi-label visual emotion analysis benchmark dataset for comprehensively evaluating the ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to predict the emotions evoked by images. Recent user studies report an unintuitive finding: humans may prefer the predictions of MLLMs over the labels in existing datasets. We argue that this phenomenon stems from the suboptimal annotation scheme used in existing datasets, where each annotator is shown a single candidate emotion for each image and judges whether it is evoked or not. This approach is clearly limited because a single image can evoke multiple emotions with varying intensities. As a result, evaluations based on these datasets may underestimate the capabilities of MLLMs, yet an appropriate benchmark for evaluating such models remains lacking. To address this issue, we introduce a new multi-label benchmark dataset for visual emotion analysis toward MLLMs evaluation. We hire $20$ annotators per image and ask them to select all emotions they feel from an image. Then, we aggregate the votes across all annotators, providing a more reliable and representative dataset labeled with a distribution of emotions. The resulting dataset contains $10,344$ images with $236,998$ valid votes across eight emotions. Based on this benchmark dataset, we evaluate several recent models, including Qwen3-VL, OpenAI's GPT, Gemini, and Claude. We assess model performance on both dominant emotion prediction and emotion distribution prediction. Our results demonstrate the progress achieved by recent MLLMs while also indicating that substantial room for improvement remains. Furthermore, our experiments with LLM-as-a-judge show that the method does not consistently improve MLLMs' performance, indicating its limitations for the subjective task of visual emotion analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_14635
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MultiEmo-Bench: Multi-label Visual Emotion Analysis for Multi-modal Large Language Models
Chen, Tianwei
Furusawa, Takuya
Hirakawa, Yuki
Shimizu, Ryotaro
Fan, Mo
Wada, Takashi
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
This paper introduces a multi-label visual emotion analysis benchmark dataset for comprehensively evaluating the ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to predict the emotions evoked by images. Recent user studies report an unintuitive finding: humans may prefer the predictions of MLLMs over the labels in existing datasets. We argue that this phenomenon stems from the suboptimal annotation scheme used in existing datasets, where each annotator is shown a single candidate emotion for each image and judges whether it is evoked or not. This approach is clearly limited because a single image can evoke multiple emotions with varying intensities. As a result, evaluations based on these datasets may underestimate the capabilities of MLLMs, yet an appropriate benchmark for evaluating such models remains lacking. To address this issue, we introduce a new multi-label benchmark dataset for visual emotion analysis toward MLLMs evaluation. We hire $20$ annotators per image and ask them to select all emotions they feel from an image. Then, we aggregate the votes across all annotators, providing a more reliable and representative dataset labeled with a distribution of emotions. The resulting dataset contains $10,344$ images with $236,998$ valid votes across eight emotions. Based on this benchmark dataset, we evaluate several recent models, including Qwen3-VL, OpenAI's GPT, Gemini, and Claude. We assess model performance on both dominant emotion prediction and emotion distribution prediction. Our results demonstrate the progress achieved by recent MLLMs while also indicating that substantial room for improvement remains. Furthermore, our experiments with LLM-as-a-judge show that the method does not consistently improve MLLMs' performance, indicating its limitations for the subjective task of visual emotion analysis.
title MultiEmo-Bench: Multi-label Visual Emotion Analysis for Multi-modal Large Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14635