IEEE FG’26 Competition on Multimodal Blended Emotion Recognition

[Philipp Müller]

BlEmoRe Competition on Multimodal Blended Emotion Recognition at IEEE FG’26
https://blemore.tech/

Humans often experience multiple emotions simultaneously, such as feeling both sadness and anger when facing an unjust loss or happiness and surprise at a birthday party. However, emotion recognition research has largely focused on single emotions due to limited datasets and a lack of awareness. The BlEmoRe competition aims to bridge this gap by advancing the recognition of multimodal blended emotional expressions. BlEmoRe introduces a novel dataset of multimodal emotion expressions that contains both single emotions and blended emotions conveyed with similar and varying proportions. We invite submissions addressing the challenging task of blended emotion recognition on this novel dataset. 

How to Participate

Training data and unlabelled test data is already available (https://zenodo.org/records/17787362). Participants submit predictions on the test data for evaluation on our servers. We employ two evaluation metrics: 

1. ACCpresence measures whether the correct label(s) are predicted without errors. A correct prediction must include all present emotions while avoiding false negatives (e.g., predicting only one emotion in a blend of two emotions) and false positives (e.g., predicting emotions that are not part of the label). 

2. ACCsalience extends ACCpresence by considering the relative prominence of each emotion. It evaluates whether the predicted proportions reflect the correct ranking. This metric applies only to blended emotions.

Baseline approaches and evaluation code are available on GitHub (https://github.com/BlEmoRe/blemore-common).

Tentative Dates

• Data available: Already available!

• Results submission: Early March 2026

• Paper submission: Mid March 2026

• Conference: 25-29 May 2026

Organisers

Tim Lachmann (Stockholm University)

Philipp Müller (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems)

Teimuraz Saghinadze (Georgian Technical University)

Michal Balazia (INRIA Université Côte d’Azur)

Alexandra Israelsson (Stockholm University)

Petri Laukka (Uppsala University)