# VAEER: Visual Attention-Inspired Emotion Elicitation Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24342 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24342/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-Plus: Learning to Use Tools for Creating Multimodal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05437/) (2023)
- [Context-Aware Emotion Recognition Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05913/) (2019)
- [EmoSet: A Large-scale Visual Emotion Dataset with Rich Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07961/) (2023)
- [Context Based Emotion Recognition using EMOTIC Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13401/) (2020)
- [EmotiCon: Context-Aware Multimodal Emotion Recognition using Frege's Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06692/) (2020)
- [EMO-LLaMA: Enhancing Facial Emotion Understanding with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11424/) (2024)
- [GPT as Psychologist? Preliminary Evaluations for GPT-4V on Visual Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05916/) (2024)
- [Visual Sentiment Analysis from Disaster Images in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03051/) (2020)
- [Unlocking the Emotional World of Visual Media: An Overview of the Science, Research, and Impact of Understanding Emotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13463/) (2023)
- [Visual Prompting in LLMs for Enhancing Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02244/) (2024)
- [StyleEDL: Style-Guided High-order Attention Network for Image Emotion Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03000/) (2023)

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

- [ESC: Emotional Self-Correction for Reliable Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02089/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Images shared online strongly influence emotions and public well-being. Understanding the emotions an image elicits is therefore vital for fostering healthier and more sustainable digital communities, especially during public crises. We study Visual Emotion Elicitation (VEE), predicting the set of emotions that an image evokes in viewers. We introduce VAEER, an interpretable multi-label VEE framework that combines attention-inspired cue extraction with knowledge-grounded reasoning. VAEER isolates salient visual foci and contextual signals, aligns them with structured affective knowledge, and performs per-emotion inference to yield transparent, emotion-specific rationales. Across three heterogeneous benchmarks, including social imagery and disaster-related photos, VAEER achieves state-of-the-art results with up to 19% per-emotion improvements and a 12.3% average gain over strong CNN and VLM baselines. Our findings highlight interpretable multi-label emotion elicitation as a scalable foundation for responsible visual media analysis and emotionally sustainable online ecosystems.