Papers for

sentiment analysis developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Emotion patterns in AI language models stay consistent across sizes and tuning

The Geometry of Emotion Representations Across Scale, Depth, and Instruction Tuning

Abstract: We measure the emotion geometry of six LLMs spanning Google's Gemma 2 family. Using an extraction pipeline established by Sofroniew et al. (2026) on Claude Sonnet 4.5 and replicated by Hollowell (2026) on Gemma 2 27B base, we compare emotion geometry across base and instruction-tuned variants of Gemma 2 2B, 9B, and 27B. First, all six model cells exhibit the core emotion geometry. A linear map fit between two cells places held-out emotions nearest their own vectors in the target model. Across all fifteen model pairs, fit in one direction each, this failed exactly once, and the median rank was 1 in every pair. Linear maps refit on cleaned embedding-table vectors recover every held-out emotion at rank 1 in all thirty ordered pairs. Second, scale spreads the geometry's variance across more directions without weakening its tie to valence. The leading component's share of variance falls from 31.6 percent (2B) to 29.8 (9B) to 26.7 (27B) in the base models and from 31.9 (2B) to 29.2 (9B) to 27.3 (27B) in the tuned ones, while its correlation with human valence ratings stays between .71 and .78 in all six models. Third, we project each emotion vector onto the output vocabulary and ask at what depth the vector's own emotion word enters the top 10,000 of the 256,000 tokens. In the 2B and 9B models the median emotion word is there from layer 0, while in the 27B models it begins near chance, stays outside the top 10,000 for half the network, and enters at layer 23 in one step. Fourth, tuning leaves every registered analysis-layer measure within its floor. At every size, valence correlation rises and arousal correlation falls by amounts within their floors, the latter against prediction. PC2's variance share also falls, with a pooled decrease significant after correction. Mid-late layer stability exceeds its floor and traces to base 27B's final layer. Code, data, and audit reports are released.

Mon 26 OctComputation and LanguageMachine Learning
The gist
This paper looks at how six versions of Google's language models understand and represent emotions. The researchers found that the way these models map emotions is very similar, even between smaller and larger models and those adjusted with instructions. Bigger models spread emotional meaning across more components, but keep a strong link to how humans rate emotions as positive or negative. The study also explores at what depth in the model's layers certain emotion-related words appear, showing differences depending on model size. Finally, making the models follow instructions doesn't change these emotional patterns much.
Open → 2610.35411v1

Quantum modules improve text emotion classification with targeted specialists

EmotiQ: A Quantum Residual Specialist Framework for Text Emotion Classification

Abstract: Emotion classification from text is challenging because many affective states are distinguished by subtle linguistic signals and semantically overlapping boundaries. We investigate whether compact quantum modules can serve as targeted residual specialists that assist traditional classifiers on difficult emotion decisions. We introduce EmotiQ, a residual specialist framework for text emotion classification using a frozen transformer classifier as the primary decision maker, identifies challenging emotion boundaries from validation behavior, and trains boundary specialists, including quantum encodings, data re-uploading specialists, prototype and fidelity specialists, and kernel-based specialists. Specialists are permitted to intervene only when they satisfy validation-based admission criteria. We evaluate the framework across six text emotion classification datasets and establish traditional model baselines. Experimental results show that the admitted EmotiQ policy improves mean macro-F1 metrics over the baseline, and achieves positive gains on five of six datasets. Among the quantum components, ZZ interaction feature maps are the most consistently effective, yielding a mean macro-F1 improvement of +0.0030 and positive gains on four datasets. These findings suggest that current quantum NLP methods can be deployed as residual specialists that provide localized improvements under strong classical supervision.

Sun 18 OctComputation and Language
The gist
Text emotion classification is hard because emotions can be expressed with subtle and overlapping language. The authors present EmotiQ, a system that uses quantum computing components alongside regular text classifiers to focus on tricky emotion distinctions. These quantum modules act like specialists that only step in when they are confident, helping improve overall emotion recognition. Tests across six datasets show small but consistent improvements when these quantum specialists assist traditional methods.
Open → 2610.25549v1

Per-token gating improves on-policy distillation in language tasks

A Unified Per-Token Gating Family for On-Policy Distillation: FKL/RKL Mixing with Multi-Channel and Bias Coefficients

Abstract: Per-token gating of forward/reverse KL losses has become a standard technique for on-policy knowledge distillation (OPD), but existing methods such as EOPD (Jin et al., 2026) and ToDi (Jung et al., 2025) each fix a single gating signal and a single gating direction, and the two have never been compared directly. We introduce a four-coefficient parameterization lambda_t = sigma(a * h_t + b * u(x) + c + d * gap_t) in which direction-aligned proxies of EOPD and ToDi appear as one-dimensional (1D) restrictions, and which adds multi-channel composition and an explicit bias as further degrees of freedom. On TweetEval (Barbieri et al., 2020) emotion and hate, with a Qwen3-32B teacher and a Qwen3-4B student, configurations in the full family reach higher accuracy than the matched-magnitude single-channel (entropy-only / gap-only) 1D restrictions in 33 of 36 comparable cells, and a 26-cell mean-match isolation experiment places dynamic gating ahead of effective-KL-matched static baselines in 19 of 26 cells. Because cells share training data, models, and parameter substructure, we report both counts as exploratory aggregate directional evidence rather than as independent hypothesis tests. Targeted three-seed paired replications of the nine headline comparisons singled out by that sweep -- including a third task, offensive -- are directionally consistent, but individually smaller than the single-seed estimates and not significant at n=3. We therefore present the parameterization primarily as a shared coordinate system for comparing per-token gating designs in short-output classification OPD.

Thu 10 SeptArtificial IntelligenceComputation and LanguageMachine Learning
The gist
Teaching smaller AI models to learn from bigger ones can be tricky, especially at the level of individual words or tokens. The authors studied different ways to decide how much to trust the big model’s guidance for each token. They introduced a flexible method that blends several techniques and found it often leads to better performance on tasks like detecting emotions and hate speech. This approach can help make smaller models smarter by dynamically choosing when to listen to the teacher model.
Open → 2609.11768v1