MASP: Multi-Aspect Guided Emotion Reasoning with Soft Prompt Tuning In Vision-Language Models

Abstract

Understanding human emotions from images is a challenging yet essential task for vision-language models. While recent efforts have fine-tuned vision-language models to enhance emotional awareness, most approaches rely on global visual representations and fail to capture the nuanced and multi-faceted nature of emotional cues. Furthermore, most existing approaches adopt instruction tuning, which requires costly dataset construction and involves training a large number of parameters, thereby limiting their scalability and efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose MASP, a novel framework for Multi-Aspect guided emotion reasoning with Soft Prompt tuning in vision-language models. MASP explicitly separates emotion-relevant visual cues via multi-aspect cross-attention modules and guides the language model using soft prompts, enabling efficient and scalable task adaptation without modifying the base model. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on various emotion recognition benchmarks, demonstrating that the explicit modeling of multi-aspect emotional cues with soft prompt tuning leads to more accurate and interpretable emotion reasoning in vision-language models.