R1-Omni: Explainable Omni-Multimodal Emotion Recognition with
  Reinforcing Learning
Authors: name: Jiaxing Zhao; name: Xihan Wei; name: Liefeng Bo
Published: 2025-03-07 12:46:42

Abstract: In this work, we present the first application of Reinforcement Learning with
Verifiable Reward (RLVR) to an Omni-multimodal large language model in the
context of emotion recognition, a task where both visual and audio modalities
play crucial roles. We leverage RLVR to optimize the Omni model, significantly
enhancing its performance in three key aspects: reasoning capability, emotion
recognition accuracy, and generalization ability. The introduction of RLVR not
only improves the model's overall performance on in-distribution data but also
demonstrates superior robustness when evaluated on out-of-distribution
datasets. More importantly, the improved reasoning capability enables clear
analysis of the contributions of different modalities, particularly visual and
audio information, in the emotion recognition process. This provides valuable
insights into the optimization of multimodal large language models.