他们挑战了多模态情感模型必须大的假设，用知识蒸馏搞出<1B的Light-MER，9个基准超了大模型还更快，做部署的可以看看。
论文针对多模态情感识别（MER）中大模型（如7B参数）推理慢、难以部署的问题，提出轻量级框架Light-MER，模型参数小于1B。通过知识蒸馏将大教师模型的知识迁移至学生模型，引入两种优化策略：基于Sliced Wasserstein距离与隐藏状态对齐的最优传输损失，以及基于GRPO的多奖励优化以平衡性能与效率。在9个基准数据集上，Light-MER取得SOTA性能，同时推理速度显著提升。代码已在GitHub开源。
Do We Really Need Multimodal Emotion Language Models Larger Than 1B Parameters?
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly improved the performance of multimodal emotion recognition (MER) and enabled interpretable description generation by jointly modeling video, audio, and language, etc. However, these performance improvements are often accompanied by an increase in model parameter size (e.g, at least 7B), which simultaneously incurs high computational costs and reduces inference efficiency, thereby hindering real-time deployment on resource-constrained platforms such as robots and mobile devices. This raises a fundamental question: do we really need the multimodal MER model larger than 1B parameters for high-quality MER? In this paper, we challenge the assumption that larger models are inherently necessary and proposes a lightweight MER framework (called Light-MER), which achieves better and faster multimodal sentiment understanding and recognition through knowledge distillation. It can transfer knowledge from a strong, large-scale teacher model to a lightweight sub-billion-parameter student model, aiming to preserve rich multimodal emotion reasoning and recognition while substantially improving deployment efficiency. Specifically, we introduce two new optimization strategies to enhance knowledge transfer: (1) a new optimal transport loss that combines Sliced Wasserstein Distance with hidden-state alignment, and (2) a new multi-reward optimization strategy based on GRPO that balances MER performance and efficiency, aimed at further enhancing the learning capabilities of student models. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets demonstrate that Light-MER achieves state-of-the-art performance while significantly improving inference efficiency. This highlights the strong potential of small multimodal emotion language models for future research. Code is available at https://github.com/GAIR-Lab/Light-MER.