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    <abstract>Prior work suggests that sentiment can often be captured by approximately linear directions in LLM activation spaces, but a single direction may not fully capture sentiment representations. In natural communication, sentiment is shaped not only by polarity but also by usage factors, such as tone and audience adaptation. We test whether these factors systematically modulate sentiment representations beyond a shared sentiment direction. We construct a controlled paired dataset that holds event content fixed while varying sentiment polarity and usage factors, and analyze Llama, Mistral, and Gemma. We identify a shared sentiment direction, remove it, and test the residual structure through erasure and generation-time tone steering. Across models, the shared direction is robust (median cosine 0.953–0.975), yet removing it leaves 0.833–0.909 of the original positive–negative representation-difference norm. The residuals contain compact, reproducible usage-conditioned structure. Targeted erasure weakens held-out usage metrics more than random and label-shuffled controls. On Llama, outputs steered along residualized tone components are preferred in 92.8% of blind target-tone comparisons while preserving the requested sentiment polarity in 98.7% of evaluated outputs.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Usage-Modulated Sentiment Representations in Large Language Models
%A Du, Hongfei
%A Shi, Jiacheng
%A Zhang, Yanfu
%A Zhou, Gang
%A Gao, Ashley
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F du-etal-2026-usage
%X Prior work suggests that sentiment can often be captured by approximately linear directions in LLM activation spaces, but a single direction may not fully capture sentiment representations. In natural communication, sentiment is shaped not only by polarity but also by usage factors, such as tone and audience adaptation. We test whether these factors systematically modulate sentiment representations beyond a shared sentiment direction. We construct a controlled paired dataset that holds event content fixed while varying sentiment polarity and usage factors, and analyze Llama, Mistral, and Gemma. We identify a shared sentiment direction, remove it, and test the residual structure through erasure and generation-time tone steering. Across models, the shared direction is robust (median cosine 0.953–0.975), yet removing it leaves 0.833–0.909 of the original positive–negative representation-difference norm. The residuals contain compact, reproducible usage-conditioned structure. Targeted erasure weakens held-out usage metrics more than random and label-shuffled controls. On Llama, outputs steered along residualized tone components are preferred in 92.8% of blind target-tone comparisons while preserving the requested sentiment polarity in 98.7% of evaluated outputs.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.356/
%P 8162-8179

Markdown (Informal)

[Usage-Modulated Sentiment Representations in Large Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.356/) (Du et al., EMNLP 2026)

• Usage-Modulated Sentiment Representations in Large Language Models (Du et al., EMNLP 2026)

ACL

• Hongfei Du, Jiacheng Shi, Yanfu Zhang, Gang Zhou, and Ashley Gao. 2026. Usage-Modulated Sentiment Representations in Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8162–8179, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.