LongEmotion: Measuring Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models
  in Long-Context Interaction
Authors: name: Weichu Liu; name: Jing Xiong; name: Yuxuan Hu; name: Zixuan Li; name: Minghuan Tan; name: Ningning Mao; name: Chenyang Zhao; name: Zhongwei Wan; name: Chaofan Tao; name: Wendong Xu; name: Hui Shen; name: Chengming Li; name: Lingpeng Kong; name: Ngai Wong
Published: 2025-09-09 05:32:45

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) make significant progress in Emotional
Intelligence (EI) and long-context understanding. However, existing benchmarks
tend to overlook certain aspects of EI in long-context scenarios, especially
under realistic, practical settings where interactions are lengthy, diverse,
and often noisy. To move towards such realistic settings, we present
LongEmotion, a benchmark specifically designed for long-context EI tasks. It
covers a diverse set of tasks, including Emotion Classification, Emotion
Detection, Emotion QA, Emotion Conversation, Emotion Summary, and Emotion
Expression. On average, the input length for these tasks reaches 8,777 tokens,
with long-form generation required for Emotion Expression. To enhance
performance under realistic constraints, we incorporate Retrieval-Augmented
Generation (RAG) and Collaborative Emotional Modeling (CoEM), and compare them
with standard prompt-based methods. Unlike conventional approaches, our RAG
method leverages both the conversation context and the large language model
itself as retrieval sources, avoiding reliance on external knowledge bases. The
CoEM method further improves performance by decomposing the task into five
stages, integrating both retrieval augmentation and limited knowledge
injection. Experimental results show that both RAG and CoEM consistently
enhance EI-related performance across most long-context tasks, advancing LLMs
toward more practical and real-world EI applications. Furthermore, we conducted
a comparative case study experiment on the GPT series to demonstrate the
differences among various models in terms of EI. Code is available on GitHub at
https://github.com/LongEmotion/LongEmotion, and the project page can be found
at https://longemotion.github.io/.