Multimodal Emotion-Aware Preference Modeling for Personalized Dialogue Generation

Authors

  • Ravi Melhatre Department of Computer Science, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA. Author
  • Lucas Crawford Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA. Author
  • Arthur Fex Department of Computer Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA. Author

Keywords:

affective computing, multimodal emotion recognition, personalized dialogue generation, preference modeling, conversational AI, responsible AI, system architecture

Abstract

The growing integration of conversational agents into healthcare, education, customer service, and daily productivity has exposed the limits of purely text-based personalization. Users evaluate dialogue systems not only on factual accuracy but also on emotional attunement, interaction style, and continuity of preferences across sessions. This paper presents a system-level examination of multimodal emotion-aware preference modeling for personalized dialogue generation. We discuss how acoustic, visual, and linguistic affect signals can be combined with explicit and implicit preference signals to shape response generation without sacrificing architectural modularity or operational control. The analysis first establishes the foundations of affective computing and the requirements of user-state awareness in dialogue systems. It then develops a reference architecture that includes modality-specific encoders, cross-modal emotion recognition, preference adapters, and generation policies supported by parameter-efficient adaptation. Structural trade-offs among latency, interpretability, memory footprint, personalization granularity, and multimodal fusion depth are explored. The paper further addresses robustness, fairness, privacy, governance, and sustainability. Rather than advocating a single monolithic model, the discussion emphasizes modular integration, auditability, and staged deployment. The work contributes an interdisciplinary systems perspective for designing personalized dialogue pipelines that remain responsive to emotional context while adhering to responsible AI principles and practical infrastructure constraints.

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Published

2026-07-29