EmoScene: A Dual-space Dataset for Controllable Affective Image Generation

Text-to-image diffusion models achieve high visual fidelity, yet fine-grained affective control remains difficult because textual emotion cues often fail to specify the visual perceptual factors underlying affective expression. Existing visual-affect datasets are likewise often limited to discrete labels, specific domains, or limited supervision of perceptual attributes. We introduce EmoScene, a large-scale dual-space dataset for controllable affective image generation, containing 1.2M images across more than 300 scene categories. Its affective space jointly represents discrete emotions and continuous valence--arousal--dominance (VAD), its perceptual space records measurable appearance attributes, and contextual descriptions ground both in scene semantics. EmoScene combines multi-model annotation with human-in-the-loop quality control. A random audit of 30,519 images yields 91.22% agreement on discrete emotion labels, while an independent multi-rater evaluation yields Fleiss' kappa=0.85. After controlling for source and scene composition, affective dimensions and perceptual attributes exhibit stable associations across data sources, reflecting statistical tendencies rather than deterministic visual rules. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we further develop AffectCtrl, which learns residuals in the conditioning space of frozen diffusion models to support categorical emotion generation and continuous control over VAD, brightness, and saturation. AffectCtrl achieves 85.75% categorical emotion accuracy, outperforms EmotiCrafter in valence and arousal control under a shared evaluation protocol, and obtains Pearson correlations of 0.673--0.765 across all five continuous axes. These results demonstrate that EmoScene provides a scalable data foundation for analyzing and controlling affective expression in visual generation.