Emotion context sensitivity—the ability to adjust emotional responses based on contexts—is a core component of human emotional intelligence. For example, being told, “You can come with me if you want,” may elicit joy if the destination is a mall, but provoke fear if the destination is a trap house. As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially interactive settings, understanding this human ability becomes crucial for generating context-appropriate, emotion-aware responses. In this work, we introduce Trace, a novel benchmark for evaluating whether LLMs can understand emotion context sensitivity of humans. This benchmark consists of 1,626 social scenarios and comprises two complementary tests: a sensitivity test, which measures whether models can detect emotional shifts caused by context changes, and a robustness test, which evaluates whether models can maintain stable emotion predictions when context changes are emotionally irrelevant. Each scenario pair keeps the core event constant while systematically varying contextual details—time, place, or agent—based on insights from behavioral theory and emotion psychology. Experimental results show that even the best-performing LLMs lag behind human performance by 20% in the sensitivity test and 15% in the robustness test, indicating substantial room for improvement in emotion-aware reasoning.

Materials science is an interdisciplinary field focused on studying and discovering materials around us. However, due to the vast space of materials, datasets in this field are typically scarce and have limited coverage. This inherent limitation makes current adaptation methods less effective when adapting pre-trained language models (PLMs) to materials science, as these methods rely heavily on the frequency information from limited downstream datasets. In this paper, we propose Semantic Knowledge Transfer (SEED), a novel vocabulary expansion method to adapt the pre-trained language models for materials science. The core strategy of SEED is to transfer the materials knowledge of lightweight embeddings into the PLMs. To this end, we introduce knowledge bridge networks, which learn to transfer the latent knowledge of the materials embeddings into ones compatible with PLMs. By expanding the embedding layer of PLMs with these transformed embeddings, PLMs can comprehensively understand the complex terminology associated with materials science. We conduct extensive experiments across a broad range of materials-related benchmarks. Comprehensive evaluation results convincingly demonstrate that SEED mitigates the mentioned limitations of previous adaptation methods, showcasing the efficacy of transferring embedding knowledge into PLMs.