Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across diverse multimodal tasks, achieving promising outcomes. However, their application to emotion recognition in natural images remains underexplored. MLLMs struggle to handle ambiguous emotional expressions and implicit affective cues, whose capability is crucial for affective understanding but largely overlooked. To address these challenges, we propose MERMAID, a novel multi-agent framework that integrates a multi-perspective self-reflection module, an emotion-guided visual augmentation module, and a cross-modal verification module. These components enable agents to interact across modalities and reinforce subtle emotional semantics, thereby enhancing emotion recognition and supporting autonomous performance. Extensive experiments show that MERMAID outperforms existing methods, achieving absolute accuracy gains of 8.70%–27.90% across diverse benchmarks and exhibiting greater robustness in emotionally diverse scenarios.

We propose a novel automatic evaluation metric for open-ended text generation, which is a substantial improvement of the recently developed method, Fourier analysis of cross-entropy (FACE), hence, FACE-2. FACE-2 is a psycholinguistically inspired metric that extracts the dynamic patterns (spectrum) of text surprisal. Examined with open-ended text generation tasks, FACE-2 significantly outperforms a broad set of baseline metrics in revealing the model scaling effect, which scales up to models of 70B parameters, while many other existing metrics fail to capture this effect. We have also confirmed the advantage of FACE-2 in producing stronger agreement with human preferences from a large human-annotated dataset. We advocate for including metrics that mine the dynamics of likelihood in evaluating open-ended text generation, which covers broader aspects of human language than only using static likelihood-based or semantic-based metrics. Code repository: https://github.com/CLCS-SUSTech/FACEScore.