Reading Emotions in the Token Space: Discriminative Adaptation of SpeechLLMs for Emotion Recognition
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2609.20081 (cs)
[Submitted on 17 Sep 2026]
Title:Reading Emotions in the Token Space: Discriminative Adaptation of SpeechLLMs for Emotion Recognition
Authors:Hasindri Watawana, Sergio Burdisso, Esaú Villatoro-Tello, Manjunath K E, Kadri Hacioglu, Petr Motlicek, Andreas Stolcke
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Abstract:SpeechLLMs have shown strong potential for emotion recognition, yet they read the predicted emotion off a generative decoder not suited for classification: it can emit labels outside the target set and favors frequent classes. We propose a discriminative adaptation that reads the final prompt token's hidden state through a classification head, producing a label in one forward pass without modifying the backbone. Because this readout starts from the hidden state the model would otherwise decode, it gives a controlled comparison of generative and discriminative inference in an otherwise identical speechLLM. We keep the head a single linear layer, trading little accuracy for interpretability: each emotion becomes one direction in the LLM output token space, revealing associated tokens. On IEMOCAP, across two speechLLM architectures, it improves Macro F1 and removes hallucinations, with largest gains on realistic ASR transcripts. Our analysis reveals that these emotion directions encode indirect associations mirroring biases in web-scale text.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Sound (cs.SD); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.20081 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.20081v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.20081
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Submission history
From: Hasindri Watawana [view email][v1] Thu, 17 Sep 2026 11:38:44 UTC (1,401 KB)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Reading Emotions in the Token Space: Discriminative Adaptation of SpeechLLMs for Emotion Recognition, by Hasindri Watawana and 6 other authors
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