Design of an Expression Recognition Solution Employing the Global Channel-Spatial Attention Mechanism

Facial expression recognition is a challenging classification task with broad application prospects in the field of human - computer interaction. This paper aims to introduce the methods of our upcoming 8th Affective Behavior Analysis in the Wild (ABAW) competition to be held at CVPR2025. To address issues such as low recognition accuracy caused by subtle expression changes and multi - scales in facial expression recognition in videos, we propose global channel - spatial attention and median - enhanced spatial - channel attention to strengthen feature processing for speech and images respectively. Secondly, to fully utilize the complementarity between the speech and facial expression modalities, a speech - and - facial - expression key - frame alignment technique is adopted to calculate the weights of speech and facial expressions. These weights are input into the feature fusion layer for multi - scale dilated fusion, which effectively improves the recognition rate of facial expression recognition. In the facial expression recognition task of the 6th ABAW competition, our method achieved excellent results on the official validation set, which fully demonstrates the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed method.

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.

Evaluating Facial Expression Recognition Datasets for Deep Learning: A Benchmark Study with Novel Similarity Metrics

This study investigates the key characteristics and suitability of widely used Facial Expression Recognition (FER) datasets for training deep learning models. In the field of affective computing, FER is essential for interpreting human emotions, yet the performance of FER systems is highly contingent on the quality and diversity of the underlying datasets. To address this issue, we compiled and analyzed 24 FER datasets, including those targeting specific age groups such as children, adults, and the elderly, and processed them through a comprehensive normalization pipeline. In addition, we enriched the datasets with automatic annotations for age and gender, enabling a more nuanced evaluation of their demographic properties. To further assess dataset efficacy, we introduce three novel metricsLocal, Global, and Paired Similarity, which quantitatively measure dataset difficulty, generalization capability, and cross-dataset transferability. Benchmark experiments using state-of-the-art neural networks reveal that large-scale, automatically collected datasets (e.g., AffectNet, FER2013) tend to generalize better, despite issues with labeling noise and demographic biases, whereas controlled datasets offer higher annotation quality but limited variability. Our findings provide actionable recommendations for dataset selection and design, advancing the development of more robust, fair, and effective FER systems.

MASQUE: A Text-Guided Diffusion-Based Framework for Localized and Customized Adversarial Makeup

As facial recognition is increasingly adopted for government and commercial services, its potential misuse has raised serious concerns about privacy and civil rights. To counteract, various anti-facial recognition techniques have been proposed for privacy protection by adversarially perturbing face images, among which generative makeup-based approaches are the most popular. However, these methods, designed primarily to impersonate specific target identities, can only achieve weak dodging success rates while increasing the risk of targeted abuse. In addition, they often introduce global visual artifacts or a lack of adaptability to accommodate diverse makeup prompts, compromising user satisfaction. To address the above limitations, we develop MASQUE, a novel diffusion-based framework that generates localized adversarial makeups guided by user-defined text prompts. Built upon precise null-text inversion, customized cross-attention fusion with masking, and a pairwise adversarial guidance mechanism using images of the same individual, MASQUE achieves robust dodging performance without requiring any external identity. Comprehensive evaluations on open-source facial recognition models and commercial APIs demonstrate that MASQUE significantly improves dodging success rates over all baselines, along with higher perceptual fidelity and stronger adaptability to various text makeup prompts.

Emotion Detection and Music Recommendation System

As artificial intelligence becomes more and more ingrained in daily life, we present a novel system that uses deep learning for music recommendation and emotion-based detection. Through the use of facial recognition and the DeepFace framework, our method analyses human emotions in real-time and then plays music that reflects the mood it has discovered. The system uses a webcam to take pictures, analyses the most common facial expression, and then pulls a playlist from local storage that corresponds to the mood it has detected. An engaging and customised experience is ensured by allowing users to manually change the song selection via a dropdown menu or navigation buttons. By continuously looping over the playlist, the technology guarantees continuity. The objective of our system is to improve emotional well-being through music therapy by offering a responsive and automated music-selection experience.

Face-LLaVA: Facial Expression and Attribute Understanding through Instruction Tuning

The human face plays a central role in social communication, necessitating the use of performant computer vision tools for human-centered applications. We propose Face-LLaVA, a multimodal large language model for face-centered, in-context learning, including facial expression and attribute recognition. Additionally, Face-LLaVA is able to generate natural language descriptions that can be used for reasoning. Leveraging existing visual databases, we first developed FaceInstruct-1M, a face-centered database for instruction tuning MLLMs for face processing. We then developed a novel face-specific visual encoder powered by Face-Region Guided Cross-Attention that integrates face geometry with local visual features. We evaluated the proposed method across nine different datasets and five different face processing tasks, including facial expression recognition, action unit detection, facial attribute detection, age estimation and deepfake detection. Face-LLaVA achieves superior results compared to existing open-source MLLMs and competitive performance compared to commercial solutions. Our model output also receives a higher reasoning rating by GPT under a zero-shot setting across all the tasks. Both our dataset and model wil be released at https://face-llava.github.io to support future advancements in social AI and foundational vision-language research.

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.

A Multimodal Framework for Explainable Evaluation of Soft Skills in Educational Environments

In the rapidly evolving educational landscape, the unbiased assessment of soft skills is a significant challenge, particularly in higher education. This paper presents a fuzzy logic approach that employs a Granular Linguistic Model of Phenomena integrated with multimodal analysis to evaluate soft skills in undergraduate students. By leveraging computational perceptions, this approach enables a structured breakdown of complex soft skill expressions, capturing nuanced behaviours with high granularity and addressing their inherent uncertainties, thereby enhancing interpretability and reliability. Experiments were conducted with undergraduate students using a developed tool that assesses soft skills such as decision-making, communication, and creativity. This tool identifies and quantifies subtle aspects of human interaction, such as facial expressions and gesture recognition. The findings reveal that the framework effectively consolidates multiple data inputs to produce meaningful and consistent assessments of soft skills, showing that integrating multiple modalities into the evaluation process significantly improves the quality of soft skills scores, making the assessment work transparent and understandable to educational stakeholders.

Some Optimizers are More Equal: Understanding the Role of Optimizers in Group Fairness

We study whether and how the choice of optimization algorithm can impact group fairness in deep neural networks. Through stochastic differential equation analysis of optimization dynamics in an analytically tractable setup, we demonstrate that the choice of optimization algorithm indeed influences fairness outcomes, particularly under severe imbalance. Furthermore, we show that when comparing two categories of optimizers, adaptive methods and stochastic methods, RMSProp (from the adaptive category) has a higher likelihood of converging to fairer minima than SGD (from the stochastic category). Building on this insight, we derive two new theoretical guarantees showing that, under appropriate conditions, RMSProp exhibits fairer parameter updates and improved fairness in a single optimization step compared to SGD. We then validate these findings through extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets, namely CelebA, FairFace, and MS-COCO, across different tasks as facial expression recognition, gender classification, and multi-label classification, using various backbones. Considering multiple fairness definitions including equalized odds, equal opportunity, and demographic parity, adaptive optimizers like RMSProp and Adam consistently outperform SGD in terms of group fairness, while maintaining comparable predictive accuracy. Our results highlight the role of adaptive updates as a crucial yet overlooked mechanism for promoting fair outcomes.

Disentangled Source-Free Personalization for Facial Expression Recognition with Neutral Target Data

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) from videos is a crucial task in various application areas, such as human-computer interaction and health monitoring (e.g., pain, depression, fatigue, and stress). Beyond the challenges of recognizing subtle emotional or health states, the effectiveness of deep FER models is often hindered by the considerable variability of expressions among subjects. Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) methods are employed to adapt a pre-trained source model using only unlabeled target domain data, thereby avoiding data privacy and storage issues. Typically, SFDA methods adapt to a target domain dataset corresponding to an entire population and assume it includes data from all recognition classes. However, collecting such comprehensive target data can be difficult or even impossible for FER in healthcare applications. In many real-world scenarios, it may be feasible to collect a short neutral control video (displaying only neutral expressions) for target subjects before deployment. These videos can be used to adapt a model to better handle the variability of expressions among subjects. This paper introduces the Disentangled Source-Free Domain Adaptation (DSFDA) method to address the SFDA challenge posed by missing target expression data. DSFDA leverages data from a neutral target control video for end-to-end generation and adaptation of target data with missing non-neutral data. Our method learns to disentangle features related to expressions and identity while generating the missing non-neutral target data, thereby enhancing model accuracy. Additionally, our self-supervision strategy improves model adaptation by reconstructing target images that maintain the same identity and source expression.