Are Emotion and Rhetoric Neurons in LLM? Neuron Recognition and Adaptive Masking for Emotion-Rhetoric Prediction Steering
Li Zheng, Xin Zhang Ant Group and Microsoft, Shuyi He, Fei Li Wuhan University, Chong Teng Wuhan University, Jiang-Ming Yang, Donghong Ji Wuhan University, Zhuang Li Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
Accurate comprehension and controllable generation of emotion and rhetoric are pivotal for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Existing studies mostly rely on external optimizations, lacking in-depth exploration of internal representation mechanisms, thus failing to achieve fine-grained steering at the neuron level. A handful of works on neurons are confined to emotions, neglecting rhetoric neurons and their intrinsic connections. Traditional neuron masking also exhibits counterintuitive phenomena, making reliable verification of neuron functionality infeasible. To address these issues, we systematically investigate the neurons representation mechanisms and inherent associations of 6 emotion categories and 4 core rhetorical devices. We propose a neuron identification framework that integrates multi-dimensional screening, and design an adaptive masking method incorporating dynamic filtering, attenuation masking, and feedback optimization, enabling reliable functional validation of neuron functionality. Through neuron regulation, we achieve directed induction of non-target sentences and enhancement of emotion tasks via rhetoric neurons. Experiments on 5 commonly used datasets validate the effectiveness of our method, providing a novel paradigm for the fine-grained steering of emotion and rhetoric expressions in LLMs.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表