# EmoGist: Efficient In-Context Learning for Visual Emotion Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14660 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14660/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09320/) (2016)
- [Enhancing the Reasoning Ability of Multimodal Large Language Models via Mixed Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10442/) (2024)
- [SmolVLM: Redefining small and efficient multimodal models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05299/) (2025)
- [What Makes Good Examples for Visual In-Context Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13670/) (2023)
- [EmoSet: A Large-scale Visual Emotion Dataset with Rich Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07961/) (2023)
- [SemEval-2020 Task 8: Memotion Analysis -- The Visuo-Lingual Metaphor!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03781/) (2020)
- [Building a Large Scale Dataset for Image Emotion Recognition: The Fine Print and The Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.02677/) (2016)
- [mmE5: Improving Multimodal Multilingual Embeddings via High-quality Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08468/) (2025)
- [EmoVIT: Revolutionizing Emotion Insights with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16670/) (2024)
- [Instruct Me More! Random Prompting for Visual In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03648/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05660/) (2025)
- [VLLMs Provide Better Context for Emotion Understanding Through Common Sense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07078/) (2024)
- [Large Vision-Language Models as Emotion Recognizers in Context Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11300/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Decoding Affective Nuances: Enhancing MLLMs via Hierarchical Emotion Reasoning and Contrastive Discriminative Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36782/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we introduce EmoGist, a training-free, in-context learning method for performing visual emotion classification with LVLMs. The key intuition of our approach is that context-dependent definition of emotion labels could allow more accurate predictions of emotions, as the ways in which emotions manifest within images are highly context dependent and nuanced. EmoGist pre-generates multiple descriptions of emotion labels, by analyzing the clusters of example images belonging to each label. At test time, we retrieve a version of description based on the cosine similarity of test image to cluster centroids, and feed it together with the test image to a fast LVLM for classification. Through our experiments, we show that EmoGist allows up to 12 points improvement in micro F1 scores with the multi-label Memotion dataset, and up to 8 points in macro F1 in the multi-class FI dataset.