Evaluating and Correcting Human Annotation Bias in Dynamic Micro-Expression Recognition

Existing manual labeling of micro-expressions is subject to errors in accuracy, especially in cross-cultural scenarios where deviation in labeling of key frames is more prominent. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel Global Anti-Monotonic Differential Selection Strategy (GAMDSS) architecture for enhancing the effectiveness of spatio-temporal modeling of micro-expressions through keyframe re-selection. Specifically, the method identifies Onset and Apex frames, which are characterized by significant micro-expression variation, from complete micro-expression action sequences via a dynamic frame reselection mechanism. It then uses these to determine Offset frames and construct a rich spatio-temporal dynamic representation. A two-branch structure with shared parameters is then used to efficiently extract spatio-temporal features. Extensive experiments are conducted on seven widely recognized micro-expression datasets. The results demonstrate that GAMDSS effectively reduces subjective errors caused by human factors in multicultural datasets such as SAMM and 4DME. Furthermore, quantitative analyses confirm that offset-frame annotations in multicultural datasets are more uncertain, providing theoretical justification for standardizing micro-expression annotations. These findings directly support our argument for reconsidering the validity and generalizability of dataset annotation paradigms. Notably, this design can be integrated into existing models without increasing the number of parameters, offering a new approach to enhancing micro-expression recognition performance. The source code is available on GitHub[https://github.com/Cross-Innovation-Lab/GAMDSS].

Action Unit Enhance Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition

Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition(DFER) is a rapidly evolving field of research that focuses on the recognition of time-series facial expressions. While previous research on DFER has concentrated on feature learning from a deep learning perspective, we put forward an AU-enhanced Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition architecture, namely AU-DFER, that incorporates AU-expression knowledge to enhance the effectiveness of deep learning modeling. In particular, the contribution of the Action Units(AUs) to different expressions is quantified, and a weight matrix is designed to incorporate a priori knowledge. Subsequently, the knowledge is integrated with the learning outcomes of a conventional deep learning network through the introduction of AU loss. The design is incorporated into the existing optimal model for dynamic expression recognition for the purpose of validation. Experiments are conducted on three recent mainstream open-source approaches to DFER on the principal datasets in this field. The results demonstrate that the proposed architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art(SOTA) methods without the need for additional arithmetic and generally produces improved results. Furthermore, we investigate the potential of AU loss function redesign to address data label imbalance issues in established dynamic expression datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to integrate quantified AU-expression knowledge into various DFER models. We also devise strategies to tackle label imbalance, or minor class problems. Our findings suggest that employing a diverse strategy of loss function design can enhance the effectiveness of DFER. This underscores the criticality of addressing data imbalance challenges in mainstream datasets within this domain. The source code is available at https://github.com/Cross-Innovation-Lab/AU-DFER.

Temporal and Spatial Feature Fusion Framework for Dynamic Micro Expression Recognition

When emotions are repressed, an individual's true feelings may be revealed through micro-expressions. Consequently, micro-expressions are regarded as a genuine source of insight into an individual's authentic emotions. However, the transient and highly localised nature of micro-expressions poses a significant challenge to their accurate recognition, with the accuracy rate of micro-expression recognition being as low as 50%, even for professionals. In order to address these challenges, it is necessary to explore the field of dynamic micro expression recognition (DMER) using multimodal fusion techniques, with special attention to the diverse fusion of temporal and spatial modal features. In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal and Spatial feature Fusion framework for DMER (TSFmicro). This framework integrates a Retention Network (RetNet) and a transformer-based DMER network, with the objective of efficient micro-expression recognition through the capture and fusion of temporal and spatial relations. Meanwhile, we propose a novel parallel time-space fusion method from the perspective of modal fusion, which fuses spatio-temporal information in high-dimensional feature space, resulting in complementary "where-how" relationships at the semantic level and providing richer semantic information for the model. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the TSFmicro method in comparison to other contemporary state-of-the-art methods. This is evidenced by its effectiveness on three well-recognised micro-expression datasets.

EmotionHallucer: Evaluating Emotion Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models

Emotion understanding is a critical yet challenging task. Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced their capabilities in this area. However, MLLMs often suffer from hallucinations, generating irrelevant or nonsensical content. To the best of our knowledge, despite the importance of this issue, there has been no dedicated effort to evaluate emotion-related hallucinations in MLLMs. In this work, we introduce EmotionHallucer, the first benchmark for detecting and analyzing emotion hallucinations in MLLMs. Unlike humans, whose emotion understanding stems from the interplay of biology and social learning, MLLMs rely solely on data-driven learning and lack innate emotional instincts. Fortunately, emotion psychology provides a solid foundation of knowledge about human emotions. Building on this, we assess emotion hallucinations from two dimensions: emotion psychology knowledge and real-world multimodal perception. To support robust evaluation, we utilize an adversarial binary question-answer (QA) framework, which employs carefully crafted basic and hallucinated pairs to assess the emotion hallucination tendencies of MLLMs. By evaluating 38 LLMs and MLLMs on EmotionHallucer, we reveal that: i) most current models exhibit substantial issues with emotion hallucinations; ii) closed-source models outperform open-source ones in detecting emotion hallucinations, and reasoning capability provides additional advantages; iii) existing models perform better in emotion psychology knowledge than in multimodal emotion perception. As a byproduct, these findings inspire us to propose the PEP-MEK framework, which yields an average improvement of 9.90% in emotion hallucination detection across selected models. Resources will be available at https://github.com/xxtars/EmotionHallucer.