PICT at SemEval-2026 Task 3: A Transformer-Based System for Dimensional Aspect-Aware Sentiment Regression with Weighted Layer Pooling

AbstractTeam PICT’s submission for SemEval-2026 Task 3 (DimASR) tackles continuous valence and arousal prediction by heavily focusing on variance reduction and avoiding cross-domain negative transfer. We built strictly domain-isolated pipelines for the Laptop and Restaurant datasets using a RoBERTa-Large backbone. Our architecture extracts a rich feature hierarchy using weighted layer pooling, isolates local context with a [CLS]-driven aspect-aware attention module, and maps to the continuous space using a deep residual regression head. Regularized via R-Drop and SWA, our system achieved 3rd place in the Restaurant domain (RMSE: 1.195) and 9th in the Laptop domain (RMSE: 1.326).