Kourosh Nadi | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

EmoNet-Voice: A Fine-Grained, Expert-Verified Benchmark for Speech Emotion Detection

Speech emotion recognition (SER) systems are constrained by existing datasets that typically cover only 6-10 basic emotions, lack scale and diversity, and face ethical challenges when collecting sensitive emotional states. We introduce EMONET-VOICE, a comprehensive resource addressing these limitations through two components: (1) EmoNet-Voice Big, a 5,000-hour multilingual pre-training dataset spanning 40 fine-grained emotion categories across 11 voices and 4 languages, and (2) EmoNet-Voice Bench, a rigorously validated benchmark of 4,7k samples with unanimous expert consensus on emotion presence and intensity levels. Using state-of-the-art synthetic voice generation, our privacy-preserving approach enables ethical inclusion of sensitive emotions (e.g., pain, shame) while maintaining controlled experimental conditions. Each sample underwent validation by three psychology experts. We demonstrate that our Empathic Insight models trained on our synthetic data achieve strong real-world dataset generalization, as tested on EmoDB and RAVDESS. Furthermore, our comprehensive evaluation reveals that while high-arousal emotions (e.g., anger: 95% accuracy) are readily detected, the benchmark successfully exposes the difficulty of distinguishing perceptually similar emotions (e.g., sadness vs. distress: 63% discrimination), providing quantifiable metrics for advancing nuanced emotion AI. EMONET-VOICE establishes a new paradigm for large-scale, ethically-sourced, fine-grained SER research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

EmoNet-Face: An Expert-Annotated Benchmark for Synthetic Emotion Recognition

Effective human-AI interaction relies on AI's ability to accurately perceive and interpret human emotions. Current benchmarks for vision and vision-language models are severely limited, offering a narrow emotional spectrum that overlooks nuanced states (e.g., bitterness, intoxication) and fails to distinguish subtle differences between related feelings (e.g., shame vs. embarrassment). Existing datasets also often use uncontrolled imagery with occluded faces and lack demographic diversity, risking significant bias. To address these critical gaps, we introduce EmoNet Face, a comprehensive benchmark suite. EmoNet Face features: (1) A novel 40-category emotion taxonomy, meticulously derived from foundational research to capture finer details of human emotional experiences. (2) Three large-scale, AI-generated datasets (EmoNet HQ, Binary, and Big) with explicit, full-face expressions and controlled demographic balance across ethnicity, age, and gender. (3) Rigorous, multi-expert annotations for training and high-fidelity evaluation. (4) We built EmpathicInsight-Face, a model achieving human-expert-level performance on our benchmark. The publicly released EmoNet Face suite - taxonomy, datasets, and model - provides a robust foundation for developing and evaluating AI systems with a deeper understanding of human emotions.

cs.CV↗