From Flat to Feeling: A Feasibility and Impact Study on Dynamic Facial Emotions in AI-Generated Avatars

Dynamic facial emotion is essential for believable AI-generated avatars; however, most systems remain visually inert, limiting their utility in high-stakes simulations such as virtual training for investigative interviews with abused children. We introduce and evaluate a real-time architecture fusing Unreal Engine 5 MetaHuman rendering with NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face to translate vocal prosody into high-fidelity facial expressions on photorealistic child avatars. We implemented a distributed two-PC setup that decouples language processing and speech synthesis from GPU-intensive rendering, designed to support low-latency interaction in desktop and VR environments. A between-subjects study ($N=70$) using audio+visual and visual-only conditions assessed perceptual impacts as participants rated emotional clarity, facial realism, and empathy for two avatars expressing joy, sadness, and anger. Results demonstrate that avatars could express emotions recognizably, with sadness and joy achieving high identification rates. However, anger recognition significantly dropped without audio, highlighting the importance of congruent vocal cues for high-arousal emotions. Interestingly, removing audio boosted perceived facial realism, suggesting that audiovisual desynchrony remains a key design challenge. These findings confirm the technical feasibility of generating emotionally expressive avatars and provide guidance for improving non-verbal communication in sensitive training simulations.

Team RAS in 9th ABAW Competition: Multimodal Compound Expression Recognition Approach

Compound Expression Recognition (CER), a subfield of affective computing, aims to detect complex emotional states formed by combinations of basic emotions. In this work, we present a novel zero-shot multimodal approach for CER that combines six heterogeneous modalities into a single pipeline: static and dynamic facial expressions, scene and label matching, scene context, audio, and text. Unlike previous approaches relying on task-specific training data, our approach uses zero-shot components, including Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP)-based label matching and Qwen-VL for semantic scene understanding. We further introduce a Multi-Head Probability Fusion (MHPF) module that dynamically weights modality-specific predictions, followed by a Compound Expressions (CE) transformation module that uses Pair-Wise Probability Aggregation (PPA) and Pair-Wise Feature Similarity Aggregation (PFSA) methods to produce interpretable compound emotion outputs. Evaluated under multi-corpus training, the proposed approach shows F1 scores of 46.95% on AffWild2, 49.02% on Acted Facial Expressions in The Wild (AFEW), and 34.85% on C-EXPR-DB via zero-shot testing, which is comparable to the results of supervised approaches trained on target data. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach for capturing CE without domain adaptation. The source code is publicly available.

Achieving 3D Attention via Triplet Squeeze and Excitation Block

The emergence of ConvNeXt and its variants has reaffirmed the conceptual and structural suitability of CNN-based models for vision tasks, re-establishing them as key players in image classification in general, and in facial expression recognition (FER) in particular. In this paper, we propose a new set of models that build on these advancements by incorporating a new set of attention mechanisms that combines Triplet attention with Squeeze-and-Excitation (TripSE) in four different variants. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these variants by applying them to the ResNet18, DenseNet and ConvNext architectures to validate their versatility and impact. Our study shows that incorporating a TripSE block in these CNN models boosts their performances, particularly for the ConvNeXt architecture, indicating its utility. We evaluate the proposed mechanisms and associated models across four datasets, namely CIFAR100, ImageNet, FER2013 and AffectNet datasets, where ConvNext with TripSE achieves state-of-the-art results with an accuracy of \textbf{78.27\%} on the popular FER2013 dataset, a new feat for this dataset.

A Visual Self-attention Mechanism Facial Expression Recognition Network beyond Convnext

Facial expression recognition is an important research direction in the field of artificial intelligence. Although new breakthroughs have been made in recent years, the uneven distribution of datasets and the similarity between different categories of facial expressions, as well as the differences within the same category among different subjects, remain challenges. This paper proposes a visual facial expression signal feature processing network based on truncated ConvNeXt approach(Conv-cut), to improve the accuracy of FER under challenging conditions. The network uses a truncated ConvNeXt-Base as the feature extractor, and then we designed a Detail Extraction Block to extract detailed features, and introduced a Self-Attention mechanism to enable the network to learn the extracted features more effectively. To evaluate the proposed Conv-cut approach, we conducted experiments on the RAF-DB and FERPlus datasets, and the results show that our model has achieved state-of-the-art performance. Our code could be accessed at Github.

MEGC2025: Micro-Expression Grand Challenge on Spot Then Recognize and Visual Question Answering

Facial micro-expressions (MEs) are involuntary movements of the face that occur spontaneously when a person experiences an emotion but attempts to suppress or repress the facial expression, typically found in a high-stakes environment. In recent years, substantial advancements have been made in the areas of ME recognition, spotting, and generation. However, conventional approaches that treat spotting and recognition as separate tasks are suboptimal, particularly for analyzing long-duration videos in realistic settings. Concurrently, the emergence of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs) offers promising new avenues for enhancing ME analysis through their powerful multimodal reasoning capabilities. The ME grand challenge (MEGC) 2025 introduces two tasks that reflect these evolving research directions: (1) ME spot-then-recognize (ME-STR), which integrates ME spotting and subsequent recognition in a unified sequential pipeline; and (2) ME visual question answering (ME-VQA), which explores ME understanding through visual question answering, leveraging MLLMs or LVLMs to address diverse question types related to MEs. All participating algorithms are required to run on this test set and submit their results on a leaderboard. More details are available at https://megc2025.github.io.

Privacy-preserving Preselection for Face Identification Based on Packing

Face identification systems operating in the ciphertext domain have garnered significant attention due to increasing privacy concerns and the potential recovery of original facial data. However, as the size of ciphertext template libraries grows, the face retrieval process becomes progressively more time-intensive. To address this challenge, we propose a novel and efficient scheme for face retrieval in the ciphertext domain, termed Privacy-Preserving Preselection for Face Identification Based on Packing (PFIP). PFIP incorporates an innovative preselection mechanism to reduce computational overhead and a packing module to enhance the flexibility of biometric systems during the enrollment stage. Extensive experiments conducted on the LFW and CASIA datasets demonstrate that PFIP preserves the accuracy of the original face recognition model, achieving a 100% hit rate while retrieving 1,000 ciphertext face templates within 300 milliseconds. Compared to existing approaches, PFIP achieves a nearly 50x improvement in retrieval efficiency.

Predicting Movie Production Years through Facial Recognition of Actors with Machine Learning

This study used machine learning algorithms to identify actors and extract the age of actors from images taken randomly from movies. The use of images taken from Arab movies includes challenges such as non-uniform lighting, different and multiple poses for the actors and multiple elements with the actor or a group of actors. Additionally, the use of make-up, wigs, beards, and wearing different accessories and costumes made it difficult for the system to identify the personality of the same actor. The Arab Actors Dataset-AAD comprises 574 images sourced from various movies, encompassing both black and white as well as color compositions. The images depict complete scenes or fragments thereof. Multiple models were employed for feature extraction, and diverse machine learning algorithms were utilized during the classification and prediction stages to determine the most effective algorithm for handling such image types. The study demonstrated the effectiveness of the Logistic Regression model exhibited the best performance compared to other models in the training phase, as evidenced by its AUC, precision, CA and F1score values of 99%, 86%, 85.5% and 84.2% respectively. The findings of this study can be used to improve the precision and reliability of facial recognition technology for various uses as with movies search services, movie suggestion algorithms, and genre classification of movies.

Privacy in Responsible AI: Approaches to Facial Recognition from Cloud Providers

As the use of facial recognition technology is expanding in different domains, ensuring its responsible use is gaining more importance. This paper conducts a comprehensive literature review of existing studies on facial recognition technology from the perspective of privacy, which is one of the key Responsible AI principles. Cloud providers, such as Microsoft, AWS, and Google, are at the forefront of delivering facial-related technology services, but their approaches to responsible use of these technologies vary significantly. This paper compares how these cloud giants implement the privacy principle into their facial recognition and detection services. By analysing their approaches, it identifies both common practices and notable differences. The results of this research will be valuable for developers and businesses by providing them insights into best practices of three major companies for integration responsible AI, particularly privacy, into their cloud-based facial recognition technologies.

xTrace: A Facial Expressive Behaviour Analysis Tool for Continuous Affect Recognition

Recognising expressive behaviours in face videos is a long-standing challenge in Affective Computing. Despite significant advancements in recent years, it still remains a challenge to build a robust and reliable system for naturalistic and in-the-wild facial expressive behaviour analysis in real time. This paper addresses two key challenges in building such a system: (1). The paucity of large-scale labelled facial affect video datasets with extensive coverage of the 2D emotion space, and (2). The difficulty of extracting facial video features that are discriminative, interpretable, robust, and computationally efficient. Toward addressing these challenges, we introduce xTrace, a robust tool for facial expressive behaviour analysis and predicting continuous values of dimensional emotions, namely valence and arousal, from in-the-wild face videos. To address challenge (1), our affect recognition model is trained on the largest facial affect video data set, containing ~450k videos that cover most emotion zones in the dimensional emotion space, making xTrace highly versatile in analysing a wide spectrum of naturalistic expressive behaviours. To address challenge (2), xTrace uses facial affect descriptors that are not only explainable, but can also achieve a high degree of accuracy and robustness with low computational complexity. The key components of xTrace are benchmarked against three existing tools: MediaPipe, OpenFace, and Augsburg Affect Toolbox. On an in-the-wild validation set composed of 50k videos, xTrace achieves 0.86 mean CCC and 0.13 mean absolute error values. We present a detailed error analysis of affect predictions from xTrace, illustrating (a). its ability to recognise emotions with high accuracy across most bins in the 2D emotion space, (b). its robustness to non-frontal head pose angles, and (c). a strong correlation between its uncertainty estimates and its accuracy.

Fragile Watermarking for Image Certification Using Deep Steganographic Embedding

Modern identity verification systems increasingly rely on facial images embedded in biometric documents such as electronic passports. To ensure global interoperability and security, these images must comply with strict standards defined by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which specify acquisition, quality, and format requirements. However, once issued, these images may undergo unintentional degradations (e.g., compression, resizing) or malicious manipulations (e.g., morphing) and deceive facial recognition systems. In this study, we explore fragile watermarking, based on deep steganographic embedding as a proactive mechanism to certify the authenticity of ICAO-compliant facial images. By embedding a hidden image within the official photo at the time of issuance, we establish an integrity marker that becomes sensitive to any post-issuance modification. We assess how a range of image manipulations affects the recovered hidden image and show that degradation artifacts can serve as robust forensic cues. Furthermore, we propose a classification framework that analyzes the revealed content to detect and categorize the type of manipulation applied. Our experiments demonstrate high detection accuracy, including cross-method scenarios with multiple deep steganography-based models. These findings support the viability of fragile watermarking via steganographic embedding as a valuable tool for biometric document integrity verification.