According to what we call the Emotional Alignment Design Policy, artificial entities should be designed to elicit emotional reactions from users that appropriately reflect the entities' capacities and moral status, or lack thereof. This principle can be violated in two ways: by designing an artificial system that elicits stronger or weaker emotional reactions than its capacities and moral status warrant (overshooting or undershooting), or by designing a system that elicits the wrong type of emotional reaction (hitting the wrong target). Although presumably attractive, practical implementation faces several challenges including: How can we respect user autonomy while promoting appropriate responses? How should we navigate expert and public disagreement and uncertainty about facts and values? What if emotional alignment seems to require creating or destroying entities with moral status? To what extent should designs conform to versus attempt to alter user assumptions and attitudes?

Previous research has shown that humans are more receptive towards language models that that exhibit empathetic behavior. While empathy is essential for developing helpful dialogue agents, very few large corpora containing empathetic dialogues are available for fine-tune LLMs. The few existing corpora have largely relied on crowdsourcing to simulate empathetic conversations, a process that is expensive, time-consuming, and not scalable to larger datasets. We propose a data generation framework for developing SYNTHEMPATHY, a large corpus containing 105k empathetic responses to real-life situations compiled through LLM generation. A base Mistral 7B model fine-tuned on our SYNTHEMPATHY corpus exhibits an increase in the average empathy score.

The current study examines the relationship between self-reported depression and the perception of affective speech within the Indian population. PANAS and PHQ-9 were used to assess current mood and depression, respectively. Participants' emotional reactivity was recorded on a valence and arousal scale against the affective speech audio presented in a sequence. No significant differences between the depression and no-depression groups were observed for any of the emotional stimuli, except the audio file depicting neutral emotion. Significantly higher PANAS scores by the depression than the no-depression group indicate the impact of pre-disposed mood on the current mood status. Contrary to previous findings, this study did not observe reduced positive emotional reactivity by the depression group. However, the results demonstrated consistency in emotional reactivity for speech stimuli depicting sadness and anger across all measures of emotion perception.

Emotion recognition through artificial intelligence and smart sensing of physical and physiological signals (Affective Computing) is achieving very interesting results in terms of accuracy, inference times, and user-independent models. In this sense, there are applications related to the safety and well-being of people (sexual aggressions, gender-based violence, children and elderly abuse, mental health, etc.) that require even more improvements. Emotion detection should be done with fast, discrete, and non-luxurious systems working in real-time and real life (wearable devices, wireless communications, battery-powered). Furthermore, emotional reactions to violence are not equal in all people. Then, large general models cannot be applied to a multiuser system for people protection, and customized and simple AI models would be welcomed by health and social workers and law enforcement agents. These customized models will be applicable to clusters of subjects sharing similarities in their emotional reactions to external stimuli. This customization requires several steps: creating clusters of subjects with similar behaviors, creating AI models for every cluster, continually updating these models with new data, and enrolling new subjects in clusters when required. A methodology for clustering data compiled (physical and physiological data, together with emotional labels) is presented in this work, as well as the method for including new subjects once the AI model is generated. Experimental results demonstrate an improvement of 4% in accuracy and 3% in f1-score w.r.t. the general model, along with a 14% reduction in variability.

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the cognitive capability to perceive and ascribe mental states to oneself and others. Recent research has sparked a debate over whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit a form of ToM. However, existing ToM evaluations are hindered by challenges such as constrained scope, subjective judgment, and unintended contamination, yielding inadequate assessments. To address this gap, we introduce ToMBench with three key characteristics: a systematic evaluation framework encompassing 8 tasks and 31 abilities in social cognition, a multiple-choice question format to support automated and unbiased evaluation, and a build-from-scratch bilingual inventory to strictly avoid data leakage. Based on ToMBench, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the ToM performance of 10 popular LLMs across tasks and abilities. We find that even the most advanced LLMs like GPT-4 lag behind human performance by over 10% points, indicating that LLMs have not achieved a human-level theory of mind yet. Our aim with ToMBench is to enable an efficient and effective evaluation of LLMs' ToM capabilities, thereby facilitating the development of LLMs with inherent social intelligence.

Empathetic conversation is psychologically supposed to be the result of conscious alignment and interaction between the cognition and affection of empathy. However, existing empathetic dialogue models usually consider only the affective aspect or treat cognition and affection in isolation, which limits the capability of empathetic response generation. In this work, we propose the CASE model for empathetic dialogue generation. It first builds upon a commonsense cognition graph and an emotional concept graph and then aligns the user's cognition and affection at both the coarse-grained and fine-grained levels. Through automatic and manual evaluation, we demonstrate that CASE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines of empathetic dialogues and can generate more empathetic and informative responses.

The first time Captain Kirk had a conversation with the ship's computer was in 1966 during Episode 13 of Season 1 in the classic Star Trek series. Calling it a "conversation" is quite generous, for it was really a series of stiff questions from Kirk, each prompting an even stiffer response from the computer. There was no conversational back-and-forth, no questions from the AI asking for elaboration or context. And yet, for the last 57 years, computer scientists have not been able to exceed this stilted 1960s vision of human-machine dialog. Even platforms like Siri and Alexa, created by some of the world's largest companies at great expense have not allowed for anything that feels like real-time natural conversation.

Customers are rapidly turning to social media for customer support. While brand agents on these platforms are motivated and well-intentioned to help and engage with customers, their efforts are often ignored if their initial response to the customer does not match a specific tone, style, or topic the customer is aiming to receive. The length of a conversation can reflect the effort and quality of the initial response made by a brand toward collaborating and helping consumers, even when the overall sentiment of the conversation might not be very positive. Thus, through this study, we aim to bridge this critical gap in the existing literature by analyzing language's content and stylistic aspects such as expressed empathy, psycho-linguistic features, dialogue tags, and metrics for quantifying personalization of the utterances that can influence the engagement of an interaction. This paper demonstrates that we can predict engagement using initial customer and brand posts.

In this work, we explore the emotional reactions that real-world images tend to induce by using natural language as the medium to express the rationale behind an affective response to a given visual stimulus. To embark on this journey, we introduce and share with the research community a large-scale dataset that contains emotional reactions and free-form textual explanations for 85,007 publicly available images, analyzed by 6,283 annotators who were asked to indicate and explain how and why they felt in a particular way when observing a specific image, producing a total of 526,749 responses. Even though emotional reactions are subjective and sensitive to context (personal mood, social status, past experiences) - we show that there is significant common ground to capture potentially plausible emotional responses with a large support in the subject population. In light of this crucial observation, we ask the following questions: i) Can we develop multi-modal neural networks that provide reasonable affective responses to real-world visual data, explained with language? ii) Can we steer such methods towards producing explanations with varying degrees of pragmatic language or justifying different emotional reactions while adapting to the underlying visual stimulus? Finally, iii) How can we evaluate the performance of such methods for this novel task? With this work, we take the first steps in addressing all of these questions, thus paving the way for richer, more human-centric, and emotionally-aware image analysis systems. Our introduced dataset and all developed methods are available on https://affective-explanations.org

On a rainy evening during the Easter holidays, I figured I could spice up the dinner conversation by talking about an exciting AI development with my family. As a younger brother, the heavy burden of being "the tech guy" fell on my shoulders -- therefore the rest of my family are not the most technical, with my sister being an artist both at heart and as a profession. The algorithm I had enthusiastically talked about was the newly released Dall-e 2 model that could produce visual art comparable to human art. The conversation went deep into what constitutes art, and what makes us'special' and a claim was made that the depth of emotion that a human artist conveys would be lacking from the AI-generated designs and therefore could be discerned with 100% certainty. You may guess my instant reaction to the last claim: it was time to conduct a test!