# Do LLMs Feel? Teaching Emotion Recognition with Prompts, Retrieval, and Curriculum Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07061 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07061/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [DialogueRNN: An Attentive RNN for Emotion Detection in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00405/) (2018)
- [COSMIC: COmmonSense knowledge for eMotion Identification in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02795/) (2020)
- [Directed Acyclic Graph Network for Conversational Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12907/) (2021)
- [A Systematic Survey and Critical Review on Evaluating Large Language Models: Challenges, Limitations, and Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04069/) (2024)
- [Deep Imbalanced Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06337/) (2023)
- [Recent Advances in Multimodal Affective Computing: An NLP Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07388/) (2024)
- [BiosERC: Integrating Biography Speakers Supported by LLMs for ERC Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04279/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DiaRelay: Relaying Dialogue Context with a Constant-Size Memory for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22745/) (2026)
- [BiCFlow-MER: Orchestrating Discriminative and Generative Multimodal Emotion Recognition via Conditional Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27615/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) is a crucial task for understanding human emotions and enabling natural human-computer interaction. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown great potential in this field, their ability to capture the intrinsic connections between explicit and implicit emotions remains limited. We propose a novel ERC training framework, PRC-Emo, which integrates Prompt engineering, demonstration Retrieval, and Curriculum learning, with the goal of exploring whether LLMs can effectively perceive emotions in conversational contexts. Specifically, we design emotion-sensitive prompt templates based on both explicit and implicit emotional cues to better guide the model in understanding the speaker's psychological states. We construct the first dedicated demonstration retrieval repository for ERC, which includes training samples from widely used datasets, as well as high-quality dialogue examples generated by LLMs and manually verified. Moreover, we introduce a curriculum learning strategy into the LoRA fine-tuning process, incorporating weighted emotional shifts between same-speaker and different-speaker utterances to assign difficulty levels to dialogue samples, which are then organized in an easy-to-hard training sequence. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets -- IEMOCAP and MELD -- show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach in improving LLM-based emotional understanding.