# LG-GER: Language-Guided Group Emotion Recognition via Multimodal Evidence Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23880 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23880/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal emotion understanding, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 16 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Multimodal emotion understanding](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/multimodal-emotion-understanding/)

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [Emotion-LLaMA: Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Reasoning with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11161/) (2024)
- [FineCLIPER: Multi-modal Fine-grained CLIP for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition with AdaptERs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02157/) (2024)
- [Facial Affective Behavior Analysis with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05052/) (2024)
- [EmotiW 2018: Audio-Video, Student Engagement and Group-Level Affect Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07773/) (2018)
- [Enhancing Zero-Shot Facial Expression Recognition by LLM Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19100/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Facial Expression Recognition of Static and Dynamic Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15777/) (2024)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Image Understanding Based on Multiple Cues: Group Emotion Recognition and Event Recognition as Use Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12911/) (2019)
- [Most Important Person-guided Dual-branch Cross-Patch Attention for Group Affect Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07055/) (2022)
- [Incorporating Scene Context and Semantic Labels for Enhanced Group-level Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21747/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Inferring the collective emotional state of a group of people from a single image, a task known as group emotion recognition (GER), requires integrating spatially distributed cues such as faces, poses, interactions, and scene context. Current methods rely on detector-driven multi-stream pipelines. These are trained with only image-level supervision that lacks guidance on which regions matter or how strongly each contributes. We propose LG-GER, a language-guided distillation framework that uses a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to generate dense, spatially grounded evidence, i.e., bounding boxes paired with emotion signals and confidence scores, for the training images. This structured evidence is distilled into a single vision-language model (VLM) backbone through four complementary losses: classification, region-text grounding, spatial emotion, and spatial confidence regression. At inference, LG-GER requires no detectors, no MLLM, and no multi-stream fusion, making GER practical for real-time and resource-constrained deployment. LG-GER has been evaluated on two benchmark GER datasets (GroupEmoW and GAF~3.0) and achieves competitive or superior results compared to state-of-the-art methods that require detection and multi-stream processing at inference.