# Enhancing Empathetic Response Generation by Augmenting LLMs with Small-scale Empathetic Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11801 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11801/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Feb 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Agentic Large Language Models, a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23037/) (2025)
- [Affective Computing in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey from the NLP Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04638/) (2024)
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- [The Pursuit of Empathy: Evaluating Small Language Models for PTSD Dialogue Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15065/) (2025)
- [TOOL-ED: Enhancing Empathetic Response Generation with the Tool Calling Capability of LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03096/) (2024)
- [When LLMs Team Up: The Emergence of Collaborative Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01698/) (2025)
- [Fine-Grained Emotion Recognition via In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06600/) (2025)
- [E-ICL: Enhancing Fine-Grained Emotion Recognition through the Lens of Prototype Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02642/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Human-LLM Representation Alignment: A Case Study on Affective Sentence Generation for Augmentative and Alternative Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11881/) (2025)
- [CAPE: A Chinese Dataset for Appraisal-based Emotional Generation using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14145/) (2024)
- [Socio-Emotional Response Generation: A Human Evaluation Protocol for LLM-Based Conversational Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04492/) (2024)
- [From Generation to Collaboration: Using LLMs to Edit for Empathy in Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15558/) (2026)
- [Emotion as a Distribution: Joint Valence-Arousal Probability Learning for Speaker-Independent Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05755/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Empathetic response generation is increasingly significant in AI, necessitating nuanced emotional and cognitive understanding coupled with articulate response expression. Current large language models (LLMs) excel in response expression; however, they lack the ability to deeply understand emotional and cognitive nuances, particularly in pinpointing fine-grained emotions and their triggers. Conversely, small-scale empathetic models (SEMs) offer strength in fine-grained emotion detection and detailed emotion cause identification. To harness the complementary strengths of both LLMs and SEMs, we introduce a Hybrid Empathetic Framework (HEF). HEF regards SEMs as flexible plugins to improve LLM's nuanced emotional and cognitive understanding. Regarding emotional understanding, HEF implements a two-stage emotion prediction strategy, encouraging LLMs to prioritize primary emotions emphasized by SEMs, followed by other categories, substantially alleviates the difficulties for LLMs in fine-grained emotion detection. Regarding cognitive understanding, HEF employs an emotion cause perception strategy, prompting LLMs to focus on crucial emotion-eliciting words identified by SEMs, thus boosting LLMs' capabilities in identifying emotion causes. This collaborative approach enables LLMs to discern emotions more precisely and formulate empathetic responses. We validate HEF on the Empathetic-Dialogue dataset, and the findings indicate that our framework enhances the refined understanding of LLMs and their ability to convey empathetic responses.