Nano-EmoX: Unifying Multimodal Emotional Intelligence from Perception to Empathy

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02123v2
• Date: Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:34:24 GMT
• Title: Nano-EmoX: Unifying Multimodal Emotional Intelligence from Perception to Empathy
• Authors: Jiahao Huang, Fengyan Lin, Xuechao Yang, Chen Feng, Kexin Zhu, Xu Yang, Zhide Chen,
• Abstract summary: We propose a three-level hierarchy that organizes affective tasks according to their cognitive depth-perception, understanding, and interaction.<n>We introduce Nano-EmoX, a small-scale multitask modeling, and P2E (PerceptiontoEmpathy), a curriculum-based training framework.<n>The outputs are projected into a unified language space via heterogeneous adapters, empowering a lightweight language model to tackle diverse affective tasks.
• Score: 9.590408084883402
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: The development of affective multimodal language models (MLMs) has long been constrained by a gap between low-level perception and high-level interaction, leading to fragmented affective capabilities and limited generalization. To bridge this gap, we propose a cognitively inspired three-level hierarchy that organizes affective tasks according to their cognitive depth-perception, understanding, and interaction-and provides a unified conceptual foundation for advancing affective modeling. Guided by this hierarchy, we introduce Nano-EmoX, a small-scale multitask MLM, and P2E (Perception-to-Empathy), a curriculum-based training framework. Nano-EmoX integrates a suite of omni-modal encoders, including an enhanced facial encoder and a fusion encoder, to capture key multimodal affective cues and improve cross-task transferability. The outputs are projected into a unified language space via heterogeneous adapters, empowering a lightweight language model to tackle diverse affective tasks. Concurrently, P2E progressively cultivates emotional intelligence by aligning rapid perception with chain-of-thought-driven empathy. To the best of our knowledge, Nano-EmoX is the first compact MLM (2.2B) to unify six core affective tasks across all three hierarchy levels, achieving state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating excellent efficiency and generalization.

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