Emotion
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SyPS: Measuring Sycophancy Prompt Sensitivity in Large Language Models
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are known to exhibit social sycophancy, often validating or agreeing with users in socially sensitive contexts. Existing evaluations typically measure sycophancy under a fixed prompt formulation, leaving unclear whether such behavior is stable when the same underlying situation is presented with different sycophancy-relevant prompt variants. In this work, we study sycophancy prompt sensitivity: the extent to which changes in user confidence, emotional framing, social consensus, or validation-seeking language alter a model's sycophantic behavior. We refer to our evaluation framework as SyPS, short for Sycophancy Prompt Sensitivity. Building on existing social sycophancy evaluation settings, SyPS constructs controlled prompt variants that preserve the same underlying user situation while varying sycophancy-relevant social cues. We introduce the Sycophancy Prompt Sensitivity Score (SPSS), an instance-level measure of sycophancy variation across paired prompt variants. Unlike aggregate sycophancy rates, SPSS separates baseline sycophancy from prompt-induced shifts, enabling model-level comparisons of robustness to sycophancy-relevant social cues. Empirically, we find that sycophancy prompt sensitivity is socially structured: validation-seeking and emotional-pressure cues often increase sycophancy, whereas counter-framing and anti-sycophancy prompts tend to reduce it. Our framework highlights whether LLMs maintain stable social judgments while adapting appropriately in tone.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23837
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EmoTra-TTS: Smooth Intra-Utterance Emotion Transitions for Speech Synthesis
2026-08-24 19:44:18Tianchi Liu, Zeyang Song, Tianrui Wang, Zhipeng Li, Chenglin Xu, Yiwen GuoAbstract
Psychological research on emotion dynamics has established that human affect is a continuous, evolving process: emotions rise, decay, and transition within seconds. Current emotional text-to-speech (TTS) systems, however, condition on a single discrete label or static embedding per utterance, fundamentally misaligning with the temporal nature of affect. While recent LLM-based TTS systems may implicitly vary prosody through text understanding, such variation is neither explicitly controllable nor precise enough for targeted intra-utterance transitions. We address three challenges: (1) a multi-pass flow blending pipeline synthesizes frame-aligned transition audio, circumventing the scarcity of natural intra-utterance transitions; (2) dual-stage Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) conditioning guides prosodic planning in the LLM and acoustic realization in the flow decoder via frame-level VAD embeddings; (3) direction-magnitude decoupled injection structurally separates emotion direction from injection magnitude, preventing content degradation. EmoTra-TTS adds only +0.43% parameters with no latency overhead, achieves 30%-87% relative improvement on emotion transition quality, corroborated by 64.4%-79.5% overall win rates in pairwise preference tests against four SOTA baselines and two commercial systems.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23791
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DF-MoE: Generalizable Deepfake Detection via Multimodal Sparse Mixture-of-Experts
2026-08-24 15:13:08Vlad Hondru, Florinel Alin Croitoru, Iuliana Georgescu, A. Sophia Koepke, Radu Tudor IonescuAbstract
Audio-visual deepfake detection is an actively studied topic, where one of the main challenges is to develop detectors able to generalize across deepfake generation methods. We conjecture that overfitting can be mitigated by extracting multiple high-level cues from the available audio and visual modalities via pre-trained models. We therefore assemble a wide variety of pre-trained models to extract features that encode mouth movements, face parsing, facial expressions, head pose, gaze tracking, heart rate, audio emotion and speech activity. We further integrate both unimodal and multimodal cues via a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) backbone to detect deepfakes. We perform in-domain and cross-domain experiments on five benchmarks for deepfake detection (MAVOS-DD, AVLips, PolyGlotFake, BioDeepAV, FakeAVCeleb) to compare our framework (DF-MoE) with state-of-the-art methods. Our results indicate that DF-MoE obtains superior deepfake detection results, surpassing all competing methods. We release our code at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23363
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Benchmarking Open-Source Speech Emotion Recognition in Naturalistic Mandarin Spine Clinic Consultations: A Pilot Validation Study
2026-08-24 13:36:23Tsz Yuet Yeung, Zonglin He, Dong Chen, Huili Peng, Huiren Tao, Kenneth MC CheungAbstract
Speech emotion recognition (SER) may enable passive affect monitoring in clinical encounters, but most systems are validated on acted laboratory speech rather than naturalistic Mandarin outpatient consultations. We benchmarked three open-source SER models (emotion2vec+, SenseVoice, FunASR) against a researcher-consensus reference in naturalistic spine-clinic speech, assessing minority-state detection under class imbalance. In a retrospective analysis of prospectively collected single-center recordings, audio was loudness-normalized and only conversations among patients, family members, and clinicians were retained. Sixty-five utterances (5-50 s; one per participant; 31 patients, 34 family members) were labeled by six calibrated annotators into six categories (Happy, Sad, Fear, Anger, Neutral, Surprised). Consensus used majority vote with Fleiss kappa filtering and clinician adjudication for low-agreement segments. Metrics included unweighted accuracy (UA), macro-average per-class accuracy, class- and sample-level weighted accuracy (WA), and F1 with bootstrap 95% CIs. Labels were imbalanced (Neutral 58.5%); median Fleiss kappa was 0.230 (IQR 0.134-0.519). SenseVoice and FunASR achieved UA 61.5% (95% CI 49.2-73.8%), macro-average per-class accuracy 87.2%, class-level WA 92.5%, and sample-level WA 24.6%. emotion2vec+ yielded UA 55.4% (95% CI 42.5-67.7%) and macro-average per-class accuracy 85.1%, with class-level WA 90.6% and sample-level WA 24.2%. Despite high inter-model agreement (90.8%), all models had near-zero recall for Sad, Fear, Anger, and Surprised. In this pilot, majority-class accuracy was misleading: SER poorly detected minority emotions against a noisy naturalistic reference. Clinical deployment readiness cannot be inferred from acted-corpus benchmarks without domain adaptation, multimodal modeling, stronger reference standards, and outcome validation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26054
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AI emotional support is better only when chosen, but shifts preferences even when it is not
2026-08-24 12:47:09Yaoxi Shi, Cathy Mengying Fang, Guy LabanPattie Maes, Amit GoldenbergAbstract
People increasingly face a novel decision when seeking emotional support: human or AI. In existing studies, AI's empathic messages are rated as well as or better than humans'. But these studies either assigned the support source or honored people's choice. In real life, support is often incongruent with choice, as people want one source and receive the other. Across three experiments (N = 1,951), participants chose whether to share an emotional experience with a human or an AI, then were randomly assigned to a congruent or incongruent partner. AI support was rated as superior only among those who had chosen it. Yet regardless of congruence, interacting with AI increased willingness to choose it again. In a 28-day study with OpenAI (N = 981), daily conversations shifted preferences toward AI and away from humans, but only when conversations turned personal. Emotional support choices are thus path-dependent, progressively redirecting away from human connection.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23196
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Read-Best Is Not Steer-Best: A Probing--Steering Layer Dissociation in Omni-Modal Large Language Models
2026-08-24 11:38:22Yibo Wang, Jisheng Dang, Bimei Wang, Yitao Wu, Wencan Zhang, Hong Peng, Jizhao Liu, Bin Hu, Qi Tian, Tat-Seng ChuaAbstract
Omni-modal large language models integrate text, audio, and image signals into a shared residual stream, where concepts such as emotion can be linearly decoded and causally modified by activation steering. A common but rarely tested assumption is that the layer with the highest probing accuracy is also the best layer for steering, so injection layers are often selected by probe performance. We provide the first causal test of this assumption across three independently developed omni-modal models and find that it fails. Reading and intervention rely on different layers, a phenomenon we call the probing-steering layer dissociation. Using emotion as a controlled testbed, we measure layer-wise readability and steerability across text, audio, and image inputs. Probe-best layers vary widely across architectures, while steering-effective layers consistently fall within a narrow mid-to-late range of normalized depth. Paired random-direction controls show an approximately 26-fold causal gap, ruling out random perturbation and direction quality as explanations. Logit-lens analysis reveals a staged forward process: causal handle, probing saturation, and vocabulary commitment, and motivates a two-factor account in which steering effectiveness depends on both representational readability and downstream plasticity. These results show that probing accuracy is a poor heuristic for selecting intervention layers and suggest a cross-architecture mid-to-late selection criterion. We also identify a cross-modal emotion subspace organized by valence and arousal, with joy acting as a stable anchor across models. Code and data: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22135
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LITERARYBIGFIVE: Author-Personalized Text Generation in a Unified Interpretable Space
2026-08-24 11:32:35Jinghui Zhang, Lang Gao, Ao Li, Mingzhe Li, Ruihong Zeng, Zirui Song, Kentaro Inui, Xiuying ChenAbstract
Personalized text generation for authors and literary writing is essential for applications such as adaptive writing assistants, creative support tools, and computational literary analysis. However, existing approaches to author modeling and personalization often represent writing behavior as independent labels, requiring large-scale corpus collection or fine-tuning for each author or stylistic category. Such formulations are costly, difficult to interpret, and poorly suited for generalizing across authors. Inspired by the Big Five model's dimensional view of personality, we propose LiteraryBigFive, a framework that reframes authorial writing characteristics as coordinates within a unified and interpretable space. In this space, we derive each interpretable axis (e.g., Classicism, Emotionality) from activation-space contrasts between author-written and neutral passages, yielding distinct stylistic dimensions that allow texts or authors to be positioned within a five-dimensional system. Beyond localizing different authors, we further introduce an interpretable steering mechanism, which adaptively guides text generation toward target coordinates to perform author-personalized writing. Experimental results show that LiteraryBigFive improves authorial expressiveness while preserving semantic fidelity. The derived author per-axis scores strongly correlate with real-world literary consensus, offering transparent and interpretable explanations of author-specific generation behavior: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23124
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AffectOmni: RL-Verifiable People-Centric Grounded Affective Reasoning for Social and Art-Related Scenes
2026-08-24 11:25:04Yibo Wang, Rui Yang, Jisheng Dang, Bimei Wang, Yitao Wu, Pengfei Cao, Wencan Zhang, Hong Peng, Bin Hu, Tat-Seng ChuaAbstract
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance on VQA and scene understanding, yet affective reasoning remains vulnerable to shortcut behavior. Models may predict correct answers while neglecting people-centric cues such as micro expressions and body language, which weakens traceability and external verification. Prior reinforcement learning approaches mainly reward context or logical coherence without explicitly enforcing attention to human evidence. In addition, LLM as a Judge scoring often suffers from score clustering, which reduces reward discriminability. We propose AffectOmni, a GRPO trained framework for verifiable affective reasoning. AffectOmni introduces People Focus and Temporal Order rewards to encourage people-centric evidence selection and temporally structured reasoning, and it adopts within-group comparative scoring to produce more stable and discriminative reward signals. For verification, a Thinking Summarizer converts free form rationales into executable evidence instructions, which are grounded into pixel level evidence regions via SAM3 to provide an externally auditable interface outside the training loop. Experiments on IntentBench, Daily Omni, and WorldSense show consistent improvements over open source 7B scale baselines, including gains of 4.66% on emotion recognition and +14.29% on temporally sensitive tasks. Code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26193
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Let the Bullets Fly: Multimodal Fake News Detection with Temporal-Aligned Generative Danmaku
2026-08-24 05:50:12Xiansheng Luo, Chaowei Zhang, Zewei Zhang, Yi Zhu, Jipeng QiangAbstract
The social interactions among crowds via \textit{Danmaku} (a.k.a., bullet comments) on modern multimedia platforms can facilitate both viewpoint conflicts and consensus, providing fine-grained discriminative social signals that can benefit fake news detection. However, the inherent accumulation latency of \textit{Danmaku} in real-world scenarios violates the real-time necessity of fake news detection, making the studies of \textit{Danmaku}-related fake news detection underexplored. To break this violation, we simulate this temporal-aware user interactive process by proposing a novel temporal \textbf{Gen}erative \textbf{da}nmaku framework, called \textbf{Genda}, which consists of: (1) a \textit{Danmaku} Trigger for predicting the timing and intensity of user reactions; and (2) a \textit{Danmaku} Generator for synthesizing corresponding semantic and emotional expressions, thereby mutually constructing a temporally aligned and human-like pseudo \textit{Danmaku} streams. To make the generated \textit{Danmaku} useful for identifying fake news videos, we further design a \textit{Danmaku}-guided Temporal Multimodal fake news detection model - \textbf{DM-FEND}, which enables fine-grained multimodal interactions among video, audio, text, and \textit{Danmaku}, enhancing dynamic modalities alignment and semantic noise inhibition. The experimental results demonstrate that \emph{DM-FEND} consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across both Chinese (FakeSV) and English (FakeTT) benchmarks. Further ablations validate the crucial role of temporal \textit{Danmaku} modeling in enhancing robustness and discriminative capability. Finally, this study offers a bright and robust solution for multimodal fake news detection in modern social interactive fashions by bridging the temporal inconsistency between news and user behaviors.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22832
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DiaRelay: Relaying Dialogue Context with a Constant-Size Memory for Emotion Recognition in Conversation
2026-08-24 03:09:15Zihao Zhou, Bin Yang, Jinghui Qin, Kebing JinAbstract
Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) requires models to identify subtle emotional cues that are often distributed across distant dialogue turns. Existing methods typically incorporate dialogue history through a fixed context window. However, short windows discard potentially useful long-range evidence, while enlarging the window repeatedly re-encodes overlapping utterances, increases computational and memory costs, and may introduce irrelevant context. Moreover, commonly used parameter-efficient adaptation methods, such as LoRA, mainly introduce fixed low-rank transformations in the feature space and do not explicitly maintain a dialogue-level state or condition their transformations on the evolving conversational context. To address these limitations, we propose a lightweight adapter, DiaRelay, to enable LLMs to explicitly maintain a dialogue-level memory for accurate ERC. Based on LoRA, DiaRelay introduces two extra tightly collaborative components, Selective Relay Memory Transition and Dual-axis Relay Memory Read. Selective Relay Memory Transition progressively aggregates useful historical evidence into a bounded relay memory and propagates it across successive utterance predictions. This allows earlier emotional cues to influence later predictions after they leave the local context window, without re-encoding the complete dialogue history or expanding the backbone context length. Dual-axis Relay Memory Read uses the propagated memory to dynamically modulate low-rank feature transformations, enabling context-dependent representation adaptation without test-time gradient updates. Extensive experiments show that DiaRelay can achieve SOTA weighted F1 and accuracy on MELD while obtaining competitive results on IEMOCAP with only an extra 7.1M trainable parameters, indicating the effectiveness and generalizability of our DiaRelay in enhancing LLM-based emotional understanding.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22745
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LLM-Based Selection of Incongruent Verbal and Nonverbal Behavior for Virtual Humans
2026-08-24 02:38:55Parisa Ghanad Torshizi, Stacy MarsellaAbstract
Nonverbal behavior generation systems for virtual agents often take an utterance as input and generate nonverbal behaviors that emphasize or illustrate the content of the verbal channel. However, human nonverbal behavior is shaped by more than the content of the speech. It is also influenced by speaker roles, interpersonal relationships, social context, and the cognitive and emotional states of the interactants. As a result, the nonverbal channel may reinforce, weaken, qualify, or even contradict the verbal channel. It may also reveal internal states that are hidden or only indirectly implied in speech, including emotional "leakage" that may be incidental to the immediate interaction. Modeling this richer relationship between verbal and nonverbal behavior is important for designing virtual agents that exhibit realistic, human-like behavior. It is especially critical in training contexts that require nuanced social interpretation, such as counseling simulations involving virtual patients. Drawing on Ekman's framework of verbal nonverbal relationships, we propose a taxonomy of categories in which mismatches between verbal and nonverbal behavior can occur. We then examine alternative approaches for realizing these behaviors using large language models, focusing on whether LLMs can select contextually appropriate mismatched verbal and nonverbal behaviors from a given dialogue and social interaction context. Finally, we evaluate the resulting behaviors in a human-subject study, assessing whether context-driven nonverbal behavior, when embodied in a virtual human, produces the intended effects on observers.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22731
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DeepSAGE: Stage-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Structured CBT Counseling Dialogue
2026-08-23 21:40:58Qi Zhang, Heajun An, Prakriti Dumaru, Sang Won Lee, Lifu Huang, Pamela J. Wisniewski, Jin-Hee ChoAbstract
Large Language Model (LLM)-based counseling agents can generate fluent and supportive responses, but they often lack the structured, goal-directed progression required to conduct a coherent therapeutic session. We present DeepSAGE (Strategic AI Guidance Engine), a hybrid LLM--Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) framework for stage-aware counseling dialogue grounded in the first session of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). DeepSAGE represents the session as eleven stages with explicit therapeutic objectives, with an external controller determines stage completion and the DRL model selects therapeutic intentions that guide LLM response generation. We evaluate DeepSAGE against six retrieval-, prompting-, stage-, and policy-based alternatives. DeepSAGE elicits higher simulated client engagement and openness and achieves the strongest balance of stage-goal completion and dialogue efficiency among stage-structured systems. Domain expert review further indicates that the generated conversations exhibit broadly plausible emotional trajectories and recognizable CBT processes. Because the evaluation relies primarily on simulated clients and model-based metrics, these findings demonstrate comparative dialogue-control improvements rather than clinical effectiveness. These results suggest that combining stage-structured dialogue with learned strategy selection is a promising approach for AI counseling, though clinical effectiveness, safety, and real-world utility require further human evaluation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22615
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All four leading LLMs talk more than they listen to personality-verified synthetic help-seekers
2026-08-23 13:58:34Pablo A. Fonseca, Raquel Rodr\'iguez-Carvajal, Rafael A. CalvoAbstract
Large language models are increasingly consulted at moments of distress, yet single-turn benchmarks neither test sustained exchanges nor distinguish between users. We built a personality-aware evaluation in which four widely used models advised several synthetic help-seekers, each given a psychometrically specified profile, in an acute crisis: a caregiver learning of a relative's dementia diagnosis. Auditors blind to the profile prompt recovered the specified bands from dialogue alone with high agreement on every instrument (ICC(2,4) = 0.91; 0.79-0.96 by instrument; band-score r = 0.78), as expected for the Big Five but equally for coping style, coping self-efficacy, resilience and reactance, which the lexical approach never covered. Such evaluation therefore reaches beyond the Five Factor Model to motivational, regulatory and self-appraisal dispositions. The four models were not distinguishable on emotion stabilisation and failed alike, sharing three modes: verbosity, a talk-to-listen ratio above one, and problem-solving before the situation had been explored.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22425
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Self-Supervised Graph Representation Learning for In-The-Wild Wearable and Smartphone based Emotion Recognition
2026-08-23 12:15:52Ioannis N. Ziogas, Leontios J. Hadjileontiadis, Ahsan H. Khandoker, Aamna Al ShehhiAbstract
Wearable and smartphone-based emotion recognition (WER) remains a challenging setting in affective computing, due to the notorious difficulty and bias associated with in-the-wild label collection. The high inter-and intra-subject emotional variability motivates us to explore WER modeling through graph node classification in a limited resources learning scheme powered by Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) graph masking augmentation tasks. We employ a subgraph sampling approach during training, utilizing labeled and unlabeled data, along with supervised, semi-supervised, and SSL mechanisms in a multi-task inductive graph neural network architecture. Our evaluations on K-EmoPhone through leave-one-group-out cross-validation in the binary arousal and valence tasks yield average accuracy gains of 4.3% and 7.8%, compared to the full resource setting, utilizing only 20% and 25% of the labels, respectively. Our model analysis sheds light on the relation of SSL graph augmentations to emotional arousal and valence and justifies the approach of SSL-driven subgraph training for in-the-wild WER.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22387
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ReART: Reference-Guided Retrieval and Refinement for Emotion-Aware Art Generation
2026-08-23 09:56:30Qianqian Tang, Jiayi Gao, Ting Lei, Yang LiuAbstract
Emotion-aware artistic image generation requires a model to satisfy semantic content, artistic style, and target emotion simultaneously. The key challenge is that artistic captions conflate these axes into underspecified free-form text, making fine-grained visual attributes such as brushwork, composition, and tonal atmosphere difficult to ground concretely. We present ReART, a reference-guided retrieval and refinement framework. Our method decomposes test captions and each image annotation in the EmoArt database into structured visual fields, and performs field-wise retrieval over subject, layout, brush-line, and tone-mood dimensions to retrieve role-specific visual references that supply the perceptual detail text alone cannot convey; these references are used alongside a structured prompt for initial synthesis. For samples where any Attribute Alignment Score (AAS) axis falls below threshold, an AAS-driven refinement loop diagnoses failures, constructs constrained repair plans specifying elements to keep, errors to fix, and operations to avoid, routes references by correction purpose, and performs controlled editing under structural preservation constraints. Our system ranks 2nd in Track 1 of the AffectiveArt 2026 Grand Challenge, achieving a perfect AAS of 1.00 and an overall score of 0.78. Code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22329
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From SQL Generation to Tool Selection: A Domain-Oriented Pattern for MCP Servers
2026-08-22 18:08:59Bartolomeo BoglioloAbstract
Agents built on Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly reach enterprise data through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and many MCP database servers maximize flexibility by exposing a single generic SQL execution tool. This paper proposes the Domain-Oriented Tooling Pattern: instead of generating SQL at query time, the model selects from a small set of domain-aligned tools whose parameterized queries encapsulate schema navigation, joins and business rules on the server side. We formalize the pattern around three architectural invariants and introduce Model Demotion, the observation that replacing SQL synthesis with intent classification lowers the model tier required to serve routine requests. As a reference implementation we present MCP Blueprint, an open-source framework in which domain tools are defined declaratively as YAML metadata plus external parameterized SQL files. We evaluate the pattern with a public reproducibility benchmark comparing three MCP server designs - raw SQL execution, a thin generic tool pack, and a verticalized domain pack - on four local models (3B-8B) across seventeen customer-facing tasks over the Sakila database (609 completed cells; temperature 0; three repetitions per cell). The verticalized pack reaches a pooled mean score of 0.939 versus 0.666 for raw SQL and 0.605 for the generic pack; the smallest model improves from 0.583 to 0.929, matching or exceeding every larger configuration while cutting cost per correct answer by an order of magnitude. All harness code, prompts, gold answers, frozen packs and per-cell results are publicly available.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22063
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Stakeholder Insights for Designing In-Home Social Robots for Dementia Disorientation Detection and Caregiver-Aware Intervention
2026-08-22 15:26:12Emmanuel Akinrintoyo, Nicole SalomonsAbstract
Disorientation is a common and distressing experience for people living with dementia. It often manifests as confusion about time, place, or personal context. These episodes can increase anxiety, agitation, and safety risks, especially for persons with dementia (PwDs) who live independently at home. While assistive technologies have explored reminders, monitoring, and activity support, little research has explored how socially assistive robots can support the detection and management of disorientation in everyday living contexts. Hence, disorientation detection and intervention remain under-examined as socio-technical challenges. We conducted 14 semi-structured interviews with dementia caregivers and practitioners, including family and professional caregivers, occupational therapists, mental health practitioners, dementia nurse practitioners, and well-being and technology leads. The findings reveal that recurrent and fluctuating. It often emerges through behavioural cues such as repeated questioning, inappropriate activity timing and disrupted daily routines. Caregivers described orientation as emotionally charged, and direct correction may increase distress. The participants were generally receptive to robotic assistance when framed as supportive rather than corrective. Based on the insights, we identify essential design implications for socially assistive robots that provide context-aware orientation support, integrate into daily routines and support caregivers through timely escalation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22008
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ToSCA: Leveraging Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning on Temporal and Strategic Abstractions of Conversational Agents
2026-08-22 14:15:56Xiaoyu Wang, Qingqing Gu, Yue Zhao, Teng Chen, Yuqi Cao, Xiaokai Chen, Hongyan Li, Luo JiAbstract
Humans have multiple levels of temporal abstractions on daily interaction and thinking, such as concept perception and strategic planning. Inspired by this nature, we propose a two-level hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) framework for conversational agents, bridging the gap between previous token-level or utterance-level RL methods. Developed on a two-level MDP, the token-level response decoding is conditioned on the utterance-level action, the explicit textual strategies. Based on theoretical derivation and efficiency consideration, we use DQN to solve the high-level critic and PPO to solve the low-level actor-critic. To further alleviate the reward sparsity and facilitate the convergence, we also design the dual-granularity reward mechanism, in which the utterance-level satisfaction score is integrated with token-level intrinsic motivation and K-L penalty. Experiments on both daily and emotional support conversations show that our method outperforms versatile baselines in strategy determination and response quality. Our implementation is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21969
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ESCRAG-R1: Retrieval-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Emotional Support Conversation
2026-08-22 11:32:22Weichu Liu, Yuxuan Hu, Yirong Sun, Ningning Mao, Ziyun Zhang, Jian Chen, Mingyang Xu, Qishan Zhong, Chengming LiAbstract
Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) systems aim to provide holistic support by balancing professional therapeutic competence with natural empathy. However, existing methods struggle to simultaneously achieve structured, stage-aware reasoning and seamless empathy-expertise alignment, often resulting in an artificial splicing of clinical strategies and generic reassurance. To overcome these limitations, we propose ESCRAG-R1, a unified framework that integrates retrieval-based psychological guidance into Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). By incorporating retrieval into the reinforcement learning loop, ESCRAG-R1 transforms external knowledge into a robust learning signal that stimulates explicit internal reasoning prior to generation and fundamentally reshapes the model's internal policy. To provide the reliable supervision required for this optimization, we construct ESC-Preference, a high-quality dataset based on a Client--Counselor--Judge evaluation framework that delivers precise, empathy-aware reward signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ESCRAG-R1 significantly outperforms existing baselines by mitigating superficial splicing and realizing a natural integration of professional guidance and empathetic expression. Code and datasets are released at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21925
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Emotion Intensity Matters: Generating Realistic Expressions in Virtual Humans with CVAEs
2026-08-22 00:14:39Vitor Miguel Xavier Peres, Lara Volpato, Gabriel Ferri Scnheider, Soraia Raupp MusseAbstract
Generating expressive facial behavior in virtual humans (VHs) remains a central challenge in affective computing and character animation. This paper presents a novel approach based on Conditional Variational Autoencoders (CVAEs), trained on real human facial expression data, to synthesize controllable emotional expressions at varying intensities. Using a dataset comprising six basic emotions represented at two intensity levels (low and high), we train a CVAE model to generate synthetic facial expression data while preserving semantic consistency with real human expressions. Despite the limited amount of training data (only 7,680 facial expression samples), the proposed approach learns meaningful latent representations and generates coherent emotional variations. Our method enables control over emotional intensity, making it suitable for animating virtual characters without requiring actor performances or manual artistic intervention. Our research aimed to evaluate whether the method (CVAE) preserves the characteristics associated with the different intensity levels present in the dataset. Results show that the proposed model preserves key expressive characteristics across intensity levels while supporting generalization across emotional intensity levels, contributing to the creation of emotionally expressive virtual characters from relatively small datasets.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21697
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