We present UNF-BMI system for SemEval-2026 Task 3, Track A, Subtask 1 (Dimensional Aspect Sentiment Regression, DimASR), which focuses on predicting continuous Valence–Arousal (VA) scores for aspects in text. Our approach integrates psychologically grounded affective signals inspired by the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework. We investigate two complementary methods: first, an in-context learning framework using Mistral-7B-Instruct with semantically retrieved few-shot examples augmented by lexicon-derived RDoC valence and arousal cues; second, a supervised multi-task learning model based on RoBERTa, where VA regression is the primary objective and RDoC-based positive/negative signal prediction serves as an auxiliary task to regularize shared representations. Experiments on english laptop and restaurant review datasets demonstrate that incorporating RDoC-inspired affective priors reduces RMSE compared to baselines, particularly in low-signal text where explicit sentiment cues are sparse.

Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) is a National Institute of Mental Health framework for studying mental disorders by integrating information across genetics, circuits, and behavior. Manually curating biomedical abstracts relevant to RDoC is a significant challenge due to semantically overlapping construct definitions (e.g., "Acute Threat," "Potential Threat," and "Sustained Threat") and the exponential growth of biomedical literature. This study compares two modeling strategies, domain-adapted fine-tuning and in-context prompting, across two RDoC-related subtasks from the official BioNLP-OST 2019 RDoC shared task. For Task 1, unlabeled PubMed abstracts are retrieved and ranked by relevance to eight of the RDoC constructs. We compare a TF-IDF baseline against ModernBERT and Llama (zero-shot and five-shot) using Mean Average Precision (MAP). For Task 2, the objective is to identify the single most relevant sentence from an abstract for a given construct, evaluated using per-construct accuracy. The fine-tuning track performs end-to-end fine-tuning of BioBERT, PubMedBERT, ModernBERT, and RoBERTa using a cross-encoder input format and per-construct grid search. These are compared against the in-context learning of several open-source language models. Both our approaches are competitive against the best-performing team’s score from the BioNLP-OST 2019 RDoC shared task. Taken together, these findings suggest that five-shot prompted LLMs and domain-adapted fine-tuned transformers are viable tools for semi-automating the expert annotation in RDoC curation.