A Multi-Agent Framework with Structured Reasoning and Reflective Refinement for Multimodal Empathetic Response Generation

2026-04-20

AI Summary

Existing approaches to multimodal empathetic response generation predominantly adopt an implicit, single-pass generation paradigm, often overlooking the structured nature of emotions and the inherent ambiguity in affective expressions, which can lead to emotional misinterpretation and empathetic bias. To address these limitations, this work proposes a multi-agent empathetic generation framework that establishes a structured reasoning pipeline—from multimodal perception and consistent emotion prediction to pragmatic strategy planning and strategy-guided response generation—augmented with a global reflection-and-refinement mechanism for dynamically identifying and correcting affective biases. By moving beyond conventional end-to-end paradigms, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the IEMOCAP and MELD benchmarks, demonstrating significantly enhanced empathetic response capabilities.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Natural Language Processing: Generation
• Machine Learning: Multimodal Learning

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and multi-modal RAG
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking

Abstract

Multimodal empathetic response generation (MERG) aims to generate emotionally engaging and empathetic responses based on users' multimodal contexts. Existing approaches usually rely on an implicit one-pass generation paradigm from multimodal context to the final response, which overlooks two intrinsic characteristics of MERG: (1) Human perception of emotional cues is inherently structured rather than a direct mapping. The conventional paradigm neglects the hierarchical progression of emotion perception, leading to distorted emotional judgments. (2) Given the inherent complexity and ambiguity of human emotions, the conventional paradigm is prone to significant emotional biases, ultimately resulting in suboptimal empathy. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent framework for MERG, which enhances empathy through structured reasoning and reflective refinement. Specifically, we first introduce a structured empathetic reasoning-to-generation module that explicitly decomposes response generation via multimodal perception, consistency-aware emotion forecasting, pragmatic strategy planning, and strategy-guided response generation, providing a clearer intermediate path from multimodal evidence to response realization. Besides, we develop a global reflection and refinement module, in which a global reflection agent performs step-wise auditing over intermediate states and the generated response, eliminating existing emotional biases and empathy errors, and triggering targeted regeneration. Overall, such a closed-loop framework enables our model to gradually improve the accuracy of emotion perception and eliminate emotion biases during the iteration process. Experiments on several benchmarks, e.g., IEMOCAP and MELD, demonstrate that our model has superior empathic response generation capabilities compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Problem

• Multimodal Empathetic Response Generation
• Structured Reasoning
• Emotional Bias
• Empathy Errors
• Emotion Perception

Innovation

• multi-agent framework
• structured reasoning
• reflective refinement
• multimodal empathetic response generation
• emotion bias correction