{"paper":{"title":"Style over Substance: A Shortcut Audit of Emotion-Description Preference Evaluation","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CV","authors_text":"Jiabing Yang, Liang Wang, Peiyan Li, Qisen Ma, Tao Yu, Yan Huang, Yingda Li, Yixiang Chen, Yuan Xu","submitted_at":"2026-07-20T21:05:08Z","abstract_excerpt":"Preference over model-generated emotion descriptions is emerging as a standard evaluation metric for multimodal emotion understanding, exemplified by the MER2026 MER-Prefer track on EmoPrefer. Such benchmarks assume that predicting the preferred description requires grounded cross-modal understanding of the video. We conduct a systematic shortcut audit of EmoPrefer using content-blind probes. A simple logistic regression using only description length and generator identity, without processing the text, video, or audio, performs comparably to LoRA-finetuned 7B text and audio-visual judges (65.8"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2607.18508","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2607.18508/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}