# Multimodal emotion understanding

Area: [Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/index.md). HTML: https://mlsanity.com/mllm/multimodal-emotion-understanding/

## Key facts

- Multimodal emotion understanding: 90 papers on arXiv since 2023 (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- 11 of its 90 mapped papers (12%) cite “AffectGPT: A New Dataset, Model, and Benchmark for Emotion Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models” (2025, arXiv 2501.16566).
- 10 of its 90 mapped papers (11%) cite “R1-Omni: Explainable Omni-Multimodal Emotion Recognition with Reinforcement Learning” (2025, arXiv 2503.05379).
- 6 new papers 17 Sep–14 Oct.

## Most cited here

- [AffectGPT: A New Dataset, Model, and Benchmark for Emotion Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16566/) (2025), cited by 11 papers here
- [R1-Omni: Explainable Omni-Multimodal Emotion Recognition with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05379/) (2025), cited by 10 papers here
- [EmoLLM: Multimodal Emotional Understanding Meets Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16442/) (2024), cited by 7 papers here
- [MME-Emotion: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Emotional Intelligence in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09210/) (2025), cited by 5 papers here
- [EmoBench-M: Benchmarking Emotional Intelligence for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04424/) (2025), cited by 4 papers here
- [Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05660/) (2025), cited by 4 papers here
- [GPT as Psychologist? Preliminary Evaluations for GPT-4V on Visual Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05916/) (2024), cited by 3 papers here
- [Why We Feel: Breaking Boundaries in Emotional Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07521/) (2025), cited by 3 papers here
- [FEALLM: Advancing Facial Emotion Analysis in Multimodal Large Language Models with Emotional Synergy and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13419/) (2025), cited by 3 papers here
- [Emotion-Coherent Reasoning for Multimodal LLMs via Emotional Rationale Verifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23506/) (2025), cited by 3 papers here

## New (17 Sep–14 Oct)

- [GesBench: When and Where Do Multimodal Language Models Perceive Social Meaning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15129/) (2026-10-10)
- [From Surface to Depth: Towards Cognitive Appraisal Reasoning in Multimodal Emotion Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11918/) (2026-10-08)
- [Cognition-Oriented Emotion Tracing from Causes to Consequences in Real-World Social Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11410/) (2026-10-08)
- [LongEmo: Towards Emotion Understanding and Reasoning in Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.40079/) (2026-09-30)
- [Decoding Affective Nuances: Enhancing MLLMs via Hierarchical Emotion Reasoning and Contrastive Discriminative Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36782/) (2026-09-29)
- [Do Emotion Concepts Generalize Across Sources, Modalities, and Architectures in Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34742/) (2026-09-28)