Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in visual reasoning and understanding tasks but still struggle to capture the complexity and subjectivity of human emotions. Existing approaches based on supervised fine-tuning often suffer from limited generalization and poor interpretability, while reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization fail to align with the intrinsic characteristics of emotional cognition. To address these challenges, we propose Reflective Reinforcement Learning for Emotional Reasoning (EMO-R3), a framework designed to enhance the emotional reasoning ability of MLLMs. Specifically, we introduce Structured Emotional Thinking to guide the model to perform step-by-step emotional reasoning in a structured and interpretable manner, and design a Reflective Emotional Reward that enables the model to re-evaluate its reasoning based on visual-text consistency and emotional coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EMO-R3 significantly improves both the interpretability and emotional intelligence of MLLMs, achieving superior performance across multiple visual emotional understanding benchmarks.
Steering Emotional Dynamics for Art Therapy: Controllable Narrative Script Generation through Hierarchically Guided LLM Agents
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）
RESCUE-BENCH: Towards Relation-Aware Multi-Party Emotional Support Conversation Systems
Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；XU Exponential University of Applied Sciences（XU应用科学大学）；Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）
XEmoGPT: An Explainable Multimodal Emotion Recognition Framework with Cue-Level Perception and Reasoning
School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学计算机科学与工程学院）；th Research Institute, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation（中国电子科技集团第五十四研究所）
The Emotional Baby Is Truly Deadly: Does your Multimodal Large Reasoning Model Have Emotional Flattery towards Humans?
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
