EmoStyle: Affective Conditioning of Style-Specialist Experts for Emotional Image Generation

Dexiang Hong, Yijie Guo, Weidong Chen, Xinyan Liu, Zixuan Zou, Zhendong Mao, Yongdong Zhang

Emotion-aware artistic image generation requires an image to match the input prompt, follow the specified artistic style, and convey the target emotion. In this challenge, the main difficulty is that the visual and affective attributes available in the training data are not explicitly provided at test time. Without these attributes, the generator has to decide not only what to depict, but also how the target emotion should be expressed through color, lighting, brushwork, composition, line, and layout. This creates a control gap between the available test prompt and the fine-grained conditions needed for emotion-aware artistic generation. To bridge this gap, we propose EmoStyle, a Z-Image-based framework that converts the input prompt into a structured generation state. An LLM reasoner first predicts affective cues (valence-arousal, dominant emotion, and therapeutic-effect labels) and an aspect-ratio decision. Instead of using these predictions only as additional prompt text, we encode the affective fields into an affective condition vector and inject it into the denoising blocks through AdaLN-style modulation. This allows the inferred control variables to directly guide the generation of intermediate features. Since emotional expression is also style-dependent, we further train a dedicated LoRA adapter for each artistic style bucket and select the corresponding expert during inference, enabling the same affective cues to be rendered with bucket-specific priors for color, texture, brushwork, and composition. Finally, a lightweight VLM-guided candidate selection step ranks the generated images based on prompt alignment, style consistency, emotional expression, and visual quality. In Track 1 of the AffectiveArt Challenge 2026, our USTC\_PI\_LAB\_TEAM submission achieved first place.