VidEmo: Affective-Tree Reasoning for Emotion-Centric Video Foundation
  Models
Authors: name: Zhicheng Zhang; name: Weicheng Wang; name: Yongjie Zhu; name: Wenyu Qin; name: Pengfei Wan; name: Di Zhang; name: Jufeng Yang
Published: 2025-11-04 16:31:09

Abstract: Understanding and predicting emotion from videos has gathered significant
attention in recent studies, driven by advancements in video large language
models (VideoLLMs). While advanced methods have made progress in video emotion
analysis, the intrinsic nature of emotions poses significant challenges.
Emotions are characterized by dynamic and cues-dependent properties, making it
difficult to understand complex and evolving emotional states with reasonable
rationale. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel affective cues-guided
reasoning framework that unifies fundamental attribute perception, expression
analysis, and high-level emotional understanding in a stage-wise manner. At the
core of our approach is a family of video emotion foundation models (VidEmo),
specifically designed for emotion reasoning and instruction-following. These
models undergo a two-stage tuning process: first, curriculum emotion learning
for injecting emotion knowledge, followed by affective-tree reinforcement
learning for emotion reasoning. Moreover, we establish a foundational data
infrastructure and introduce a emotion-centric fine-grained dataset (Emo-CFG)
consisting of 2.1M diverse instruction-based samples. Emo-CFG includes
explainable emotional question-answering, fine-grained captions, and associated
rationales, providing essential resources for advancing emotion understanding
tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive
performance, setting a new milestone across 15 face perception tasks.