# Beyond Text: LLM-Based Dimensional Emotion Evaluation in Multimodal Dialogue

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39072 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39072/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00547/) (2020)
- [DialogueRNN: An Attentive RNN for Emotion Detection in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00405/) (2018)
- [DialogueGCN: A Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11540/) (2019)
- [EXPRESSO: A Benchmark and Analysis of Discrete Expressive Speech Resynthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05725/) (2023)
- [Aff-Wild2: Extending the Aff-Wild Database for Affect Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07770/) (2018)
- [Towards Multimodal Empathetic Response Generation: A Rich Text-Speech-Vision Avatar-based Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04976/) (2025)
- [DeepDialogue: A Multi-Turn Emotionally-Rich Spoken Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19978/) (2025)
- [Beyond Spurious Signals: Debiasing Multimodal Large Language Models via Counterfactual Inference and Adaptive Expert Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15361/) (2025)
- [Two-stage dimensional emotion recognition by fusing predictions of acoustic and text networks using SVM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14495/) (2022)
- [CUEMPATHY: A Counseling Speech Dataset for Psychotherapy Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02466/) (2024)
- [A Multi-Task, Multi-Modal Approach for Predicting Categorical and Dimensional Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00536/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotion recognition in conversation has been widely studied, but applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to continuous dimensional emotion evaluation in multimodal dialogue remains largely unexplored. We propose an LLM-based framework that performs discrete emotion recognition and Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) dimensional evaluation on IEMOCAP, incorporating acoustic cues as natural language descriptions following the SpeechCueLLM approach. We evaluate six models spanning the LLaMA, GPT, and Qwen families under zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, and LoRA fine-tuning. LoRA fine-tuned LLaMA models substantially outperform prompt-engineered GPT models on both tasks despite GPT's larger scale, a gap we attribute to domain adaptation rather than model capacity. Our best model achieves a Valence CCC of 0.7822, a new state-of-the-art on IEMOCAP. Ablation studies confirm that textual audio descriptions meaningfully improve smaller models (+3.5 to 3.6 weighted F1) while contributing little for the largest model, suggesting audio cues are most valuable when linguistic capacity is limited. The performance asymmetry across VAD dimensions closely mirrors the annotator agreement hierarchy in IEMOCAP's own annotations.