Emotion Across Speech and Faces: Shared Affective Mechanisms in Multimodal Foundation Models

arXiv:2608.17102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern multimodal foundation models (MFMs) have made rapid progress on tasks requiring integrated perception across speech, vision, and language, including emotion recognition. However, it remains unclear whether they recognize speech and facial emotion through shared affective functional units or modality-specific pathways. We explore emotion-sensitive neurons (ESNs), sparse decoder neurons selectively associated with emotion categories, in three ...