Speak From Heart: An Emotion-Guided LLM-Based Multimodal Method for Emotional Dialogue Generation

Recent advancements in Large Language Models~(LLMs) have greatly enhanced the generation capabilities of dialogue systems. However, progress on emotional expression during dialogues might be still limited, especially when capturing and processing the multimodal cues for emotional expression. Therefore, it is urgent to fully adapt the multimodal understanding ability and transferability of LLMs to enhance the emotional-oriented multimodal processing capabilities. To that end, in this paper, we propose a novel Emotion-Guided Multimodal Dialogue model based on LLM, termed ELMD. Specifically, to enhance the emotional expression ability of LLMs, our ELMD customizes an emotional retrieval module, which mainly provides appropriate response demonstration for LLM in understanding emotional context. Subsequently, a two-stage training strategy is proposed, founded on previous demonstration support, to support uncovering nuanced emotions behind multimodal information and constructing natural responses. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of ELMD.