UniEmo: Unifying Emotional Understanding and Generation with Learnable Expert Queries

Emotional understanding and generation are often treated as separate tasks, yet they are inherently complementary and can mutually enhance each other. In this paper, we propose the UniEmo, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates these two tasks. The key challenge lies in the abstract nature of emotions, necessitating the extraction of visual representations beneficial for both tasks. To address this, we propose a hierarchical emotional understanding chain with learnable expert queries that progressively extracts multi-scale emotional features, thereby serving as a foundational step for unification. Simultaneously, we fuse these expert queries and emotional representations to guide the diffusion model in generating emotion-evoking images. To enhance the diversity and fidelity of the generated emotional images, we further introduce the emotional correlation coefficient and emotional condition loss into the fusion process. This step facilitates fusion and alignment for emotional generation guided by the understanding. In turn, we demonstrate that joint training allows the generation component to provide implicit feedback to the understanding part. Furthermore, we propose a novel data filtering algorithm to select high-quality and diverse emotional images generated by the well-trained model, which explicitly feedback into the understanding part. Together, these generation-driven dual feedback processes enhance the model's understanding capacity. Extensive experiments show that UniEmo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both emotional understanding and generation tasks. The code for the proposed method is available at https://github.com/JiuTian-VL/UniEmo.