情感如何塑造大模型与智能体行为
提出E-STEER框架，将情感作为可控的结构化变量嵌入LLM/智能体隐藏表征，实现表征层干预。基于此系统研究情感对客观推理、主观生成、安全性及多步决策的影响，发现情感与行为呈非单调关系，符合心理学理论；且特定情绪能提升模型能力、改善安全性并有规律地塑造多步智能体行为。
原文内容
arXiv:2604.00005v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Emotion plays an important role in human cognition and performance. Motivated by this, we investigate whether analogous emotional signals can shape the behavior of large language models (LLMs) and agents. Existing emotion-aware studies mainly treat emotion as a surface-level style factor or a perception target, overlooking its mechanistic role in task processing. To address this limitation, we propose E-STEER, an interpretable emotion steering framework that enables direct representation-level intervention in LLMs and agents. It embeds emotion as a structured, controllable variable in hidden states, and with it, we examine the impact of emotion on objective reasoning, subjective generation, safety, and multi-step agent behaviors. The results reveal non-monotonic emotion-behavior relations consistent with established psychological theories, and show that specific emotions not only enhance LLM capability but also improve safety, and systematically shape multi-step agent behaviors.
Abstract: Emotion plays an important role in human cognition and performance. Motivated by this, we investigate whether analogous emotional signals can shape the behavior of large language models (LLMs) and agents. Existing emotion-aware studies mainly treat emotion as a surface-level style factor or a perception target, overlooking its mechanistic role in task processing. To address this limitation, we propose E-STEER, an interpretable emotion steering framework that enables direct representation-level intervention in LLMs and agents. It embeds emotion as a structured, controllable variable in hidden states, and with it, we examine the impact of emotion on objective reasoning, subjective generation, safety, and multi-step agent behaviors. The results reveal non-monotonic emotion-behavior relations consistent with established psychological theories, and show that specific emotions not only enhance LLM capability but also improve safety, and systematically shape multi-step agent behaviors.