Light-MER Checkpoints

This repository hosts model checkpoints for Light-MER, the official implementation of:

Do We Really Need Multimodal Emotion Language Models Larger Than 1B Parameters?

• Paper: Hugging Face Papers / arXiv
• Code: GAIR-Lab/Light-MER

Checkpoints

File	Description	Status
light-mer-teacher-qwen3-8b.pth	Qwen3-8B teacher checkpoint for Stage 1 SWD-H distillation	Released
stage1-swdh-qwen3-0.6b/checkpoint_000060_loss_1.291.pth	Recommended Qwen3-0.6B student checkpoint after Stage 1 SWD-H distillation	Released
stage1-swdh-qwen3-0.6b/checkpoint_*.pth	Stage 1 SWD-H checkpoint trajectory from epoch 5 to epoch 60	Released
stage1-swdh-qwen3-0.6b/config.yaml	Stage 1 SWD-H training config used for the released checkpoints	Released
light-mer-stage2-mgrpo-qwen3-0.6b.pth	Qwen3-0.6B student after Stage 2 M-GRPO refinement	COMING SOON

Usage

Download the teacher checkpoint and place it under the GitHub repo checkpoint directory:

checkpoints/light-mer-teacher-qwen3-8b.pth

Then run Stage 1 SWD-H distillation with:

CONDA_ENV_NAME=swdh-stage1 \
TEACHER_CKPT=checkpoints/light-mer-teacher-qwen3-8b.pth \
bash scripts/train_stage1_swdh.sh

For Stage 1 inference or evaluation, download one of the released student checkpoints, for example:

checkpoints/light-mer-stage1-swdh-qwen3-0.6b.pth

The recommended Stage 1 checkpoint is:

stage1-swdh-qwen3-0.6b/checkpoint_000060_loss_1.291.pth

License

This checkpoint repository is released under the Apache License 2.0. Please also follow the licenses and usage terms of the external datasets and pretrained models used with Light-MER.

Citation

If you find Light-MER useful, please cite:

@misc{zheng2026lightmer,
  title = {Do We Really Need Multimodal Emotion Language Models Larger Than 1B Parameters?},
  author = {Zheng, Kaiwen and Fu, Junchen and Deng, Wenhao and Han, Hu and Jose, Joemon M. and Ge, Xuri},
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2607.12787},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass = {cs.AI},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12787},
  note = {Accepted by ACM MM 2026}
}