EmoGist: Efficient In-Context Learning for Visual Emotion Understanding

Ronald Seoh, Dan Goldwasser


Abstract
In this paper, we introduce EmoGist, a training-free, in-context learning method for performing visual emotion classification with LVLMs. The key intuition of our approach is that context-dependent definition of emotion labels could allow more accurate predictions of emotions, as the ways in which emotions manifest within images are highly context dependent and nuanced. EmoGist pre-generates multiple descriptions of emotion labels, by analyzing the clusters of example images belonging to each label. At test time, we retrieve a version of description based on the cosine similarity of test image to cluster centroids, and feed it together with the test image to a fast LVLM for classification. Through our experiments, we show that EmoGist allows up to 12 points improvement in micro F1 scores with the multi-label Memotion dataset, and up to 8 points in macro F1 in the multi-class FI dataset.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.116
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2171–2182
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.116/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.116
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ronald Seoh and Dan Goldwasser. 2025. EmoGist: Efficient In-Context Learning for Visual Emotion Understanding. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 2171–2182, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
EmoGist: Efficient In-Context Learning for Visual Emotion Understanding (Seoh & Goldwasser, Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.116.pdf
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