MER2025 is the third year of our MER series of challenges, aiming to bring together researchers in the affective computing community to explore emerging trends and future directions in the field. Previously, MER2023 focused on multi-label learning, noise robustness, and semi-supervised learning, while MER2024 introduced a new track dedicated to open-vocabulary emotion recognition. This year, MER2025 centers on the theme "When Affective Computing Meets Large Language Models (LLMs)".We aim to shift the paradigm from traditional categorical frameworks reliant on predefined emotion taxonomies to LLM-driven generative methods, offering innovative solutions for more accurate and reliable emotion understanding. The challenge features four tracks: MER-SEMI focuses on fixed categorical emotion recognition enhanced by semi-supervised learning; MER-FG explores fine-grained emotions, expanding recognition from basic to nuanced emotional states; MER-DES incorporates multimodal cues (beyond emotion words) into predictions to enhance model interpretability; MER-PR investigates whether emotion prediction results can improve personality recognition performance. For the first three tracks, baseline code is available at MERTools, and datasets can be accessed via Hugging Face. For the last track, the dataset and baseline code are available on GitHub.
@article{arxiv.2504.19423,
title = {MER 2025: When Affective Computing Meets Large Language Models},
author = {Zheng Lian and Rui Liu and Kele Xu and Bin Liu and Xuefei Liu and Yazhou Zhang and Xin Liu and Yong Li and Zebang Cheng and Haolin Zuo and Ziyang Ma and Xiaojiang Peng and Xie Chen and Ya Li and Erik Cambria and Guoying Zhao and Björn W. Schuller and Jianhua Tao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.19423},
year = {2025}
}