Evaluation of Generative Models for Emotional 3D Animation Generation in VR

Social interactions incorporate nonverbal signals to convey emotions alongside speech, including facial expressions and body gestures. Generative models have demonstrated promising results in creating full-body nonverbal animations synchronized with speech; however, evaluations using statistical metrics in 2D settings fail to fully capture user-perceived emotions, limiting our understanding of model effectiveness. To address this, we evaluate emotional 3D animation generative models within a Virtual Reality (VR) environment, emphasizing user-centric metrics emotional arousal realism, naturalness, enjoyment, diversity, and interaction quality in a real-time human-agent interaction scenario. Through a user study (N=48), we examine perceived emotional quality for three state of the art speech-driven 3D animation methods across two emotions happiness (high arousal) and neutral (mid arousal). Additionally, we compare these generative models against real human expressions obtained via a reconstruction-based method to assess both their strengths and limitations and how closely they replicate real human facial and body expressions. Our results demonstrate that methods explicitly modeling emotions lead to higher recognition accuracy compared to those focusing solely on speech-driven synchrony. Users rated the realism and naturalness of happy animations significantly higher than those of neutral animations, highlighting the limitations of current generative models in handling subtle emotional states. Generative models underperformed compared to reconstruction-based methods in facial expression quality, and all methods received relatively low ratings for animation enjoyment and interaction quality, emphasizing the importance of incorporating user-centric evaluations into generative model development. Finally, participants positively recognized animation diversity across all generative models.

Detection of Digital Facial Retouching utilizing Face Beauty Information

Facial retouching to beautify images is widely spread in social media, advertisements, and it is even applied in professional photo studios to let individuals appear younger, remove wrinkles and skin impurities. Generally speaking, this is done to enhance beauty. This is not a problem itself, but when retouched images are used as biometric samples and enrolled in a biometric system, it is one. Since previous work has proven facial retouching to be a challenge for face recognition systems,the detection of facial retouching becomes increasingly necessary. This work proposes to study and analyze changes in beauty assessment algorithms of retouched images, assesses different feature extraction methods based on artificial intelligence in order to improve retouching detection, and evaluates whether face beauty can be exploited to enhance the detection rate. In a scenario where the attacking retouching algorithm is unknown, this work achieved 1.1% D-EER on single image detection.

USTM: Unified Spatial and Temporal Modeling for Continuous Sign Language Recognition

Continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) requires precise spatio-temporal modeling to accurately recognize sequences of gestures in videos. Existing frameworks often rely on CNN-based spatial backbones combined with temporal convolution or recurrent modules. These techniques fail in capturing fine-grained hand and facial cues and modeling long-range temporal dependencies. To address these limitations, we propose the Unified Spatio-Temporal Modeling (USTM) framework, a spatio-temporal encoder that effectively models complex patterns using a combination of a Swin Transformer backbone enhanced with lightweight temporal adapter with positional embeddings (TAPE). Our framework captures fine-grained spatial features alongside short and long-term temporal context, enabling robust sign language recognition from RGB videos without relying on multi-stream inputs or auxiliary modalities. Extensive experiments on benchmarked datasets including PHOENIX14, PHOENIX14T, and CSL-Daily demonstrate that USTM achieves state-of-the-art performance against RGB-based as well as multi-modal CSLR approaches, while maintaining competitive performance against multi-stream approaches. These results highlight the strength and efficacy of the USTM framework for CSLR. The code is available at https://github.com/gufranSabri/USTM

Transformer-Driven Multimodal Fusion for Explainable Suspiciousness Estimation in Visual Surveillance

Suspiciousness estimation is critical for proactive threat detection and ensuring public safety in complex environments. This work introduces a large-scale annotated dataset, USE50k, along with a computationally efficient vision-based framework for real-time suspiciousness analysis. The USE50k dataset contains 65,500 images captured from diverse and uncontrolled environments, such as airports, railway stations, restaurants, parks, and other public areas, covering a broad spectrum of cues including weapons, fire, crowd density, abnormal facial expressions, and unusual body postures. Building on this dataset, we present DeepUSEvision, a lightweight and modular system integrating three key components, i.e., a Suspicious Object Detector based on an enhanced YOLOv12 architecture, dual Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN-I and DCNN-II) for facial expression and body-language recognition using image and landmark features, and a transformer-based Discriminator Network that adaptively fuses multimodal outputs to yield an interpretable suspiciousness score. Extensive experiments confirm the superior accuracy, robustness, and interpretability of the proposed framework compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Collectively, the USE50k dataset and the DeepUSEvision framework establish a strong and scalable foundation for intelligent surveillance and real-time risk assessment in safety-critical applications.

A Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Emotion Recognition in Children with Autism During NAO Robot-Mediated Interaction

Understanding emotional responses in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) during social interaction remains a critical challenge in both developmental psychology and human-robot interaction. This study presents a novel deep learning pipeline for emotion recognition in autistic children in response to a name-calling event by a humanoid robot (NAO), under controlled experimental settings. The dataset comprises of around 50,000 facial frames extracted from video recordings of 15 children with ASD. A hybrid model combining a fine-tuned ResNet-50-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a three-layer Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) trained on both visual and geometric features extracted from MediaPipe FaceMesh landmarks. Emotions were probabilistically labeled using a weighted ensemble of two models: DeepFace's and FER, each contributing to soft-label generation across seven emotion classes. Final classification leveraged a fused embedding optimized via Kullback-Leibler divergence. The proposed method demonstrates robust performance in modeling subtle affective responses and offers significant promise for affective profiling of ASD children in clinical and therapeutic human-robot interaction contexts, as the pipeline effectively captures micro emotional cues in neurodivergent children, addressing a major gap in autism-specific HRI research. This work represents the first such large-scale, real-world dataset and pipeline from India on autism-focused emotion analysis using social robotics, contributing an essential foundation for future personalized assistive technologies.

Batch Transformer Architecture: Case of Synthetic Image Generation for Emotion Expression Facial Recognition

A novel Transformer variation architecture is proposed in the implicit sparse style. Unlike "traditional" Transformers, instead of attention to sequential or batch entities in their entirety of whole dimensionality, in the proposed Batch Transformers, attention to the "important" dimensions (primary components) is implemented. In such a way, the "important" dimensions or feature selection allows for a significant reduction of the bottleneck size in the encoder-decoder ANN architectures. The proposed architecture is tested on the synthetic image generation for the face recognition task in the case of the makeup and occlusion data set, allowing for increased variability of the limited original data set.

Facial-R1: Aligning Reasoning and Recognition for Facial Emotion Analysis

Facial Emotion Analysis (FEA) extends traditional facial emotion recognition by incorporating explainable, fine-grained reasoning. The task integrates three subtasks: emotion recognition, facial Action Unit (AU) recognition, and AU-based emotion reasoning to model affective states jointly. While recent approaches leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and achieve promising results, they face two critical limitations: (1) hallucinated reasoning, where VLMs generate plausible but inaccurate explanations due to insufficient emotion-specific knowledge; and (2) misalignment between emotion reasoning and recognition, caused by fragmented connections between observed facial features and final labels. We propose Facial-R1, a three-stage alignment framework that effectively addresses both challenges with minimal supervision. First, we employ instruction fine-tuning to establish basic emotional reasoning capability. Second, we introduce reinforcement training guided by emotion and AU labels as reward signals, which explicitly aligns the generated reasoning process with the predicted emotion. Third, we design a data synthesis pipeline that iteratively leverages the prior stages to expand the training dataset, enabling scalable self-improvement of the model. Built upon this framework, we introduce FEA-20K, a benchmark dataset comprising 17,737 training and 1,688 test samples with fine-grained emotion analysis annotations. Extensive experiments across eight standard benchmarks demonstrate that Facial-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance in FEA, with strong generalization and robust interpretability.

Text-guided Weakly Supervised Framework for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition

Dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER) aims to identify emotional states by modeling the temporal changes in facial movements across video sequences. A key challenge in DFER is the many-to-one labeling problem, where a video composed of numerous frames is assigned a single emotion label. A common strategy to mitigate this issue is to formulate DFER as a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) problem. However, MIL-based approaches inherently suffer from the visual diversity of emotional expressions and the complexity of temporal dynamics. To address this challenge, we propose TG-DFER, a text-guided weakly supervised framework that enhances MIL-based DFER by incorporating semantic guidance and coherent temporal modeling. We incorporate a vision-language pre-trained (VLP) model is integrated to provide semantic guidance through fine-grained textual descriptions of emotional context. Furthermore, we introduce visual prompts, which align enriched textual emotion labels with visual instance features, enabling fine-grained reasoning and frame-level relevance estimation. In addition, a multi-grained temporal network is designed to jointly capture short-term facial dynamics and long-range emotional flow, ensuring coherent affective understanding across time. Extensive results demonstrate that TG-DFER achieves improved generalization, interpretability, and temporal sensitivity under weak supervision.

Facial Expression Recognition with YOLOv11 and YOLOv12: A Comparative Study

Facial Expression Recognition remains a challenging task, especially in unconstrained, real-world environments. This study investigates the performance of two lightweight models, YOLOv11n and YOLOv12n, which are the nano variants of the latest official YOLO series, within a unified detection and classification framework for FER. Two benchmark classification datasets, FER2013 and KDEF, are converted into object detection format and model performance is evaluated using mAP 0.5, precision, recall, and confusion matrices. Results show that YOLOv12n achieves the highest overall performance on the clean KDEF dataset with a mAP 0.5 of 95.6, and also outperforms YOLOv11n on the FER2013 dataset in terms of mAP 63.8, reflecting stronger sensitivity to varied expressions. In contrast, YOLOv11n demonstrates higher precision 65.2 on FER2013, indicating fewer false positives and better reliability in noisy, real-world conditions. On FER2013, both models show more confusion between visually similar expressions, while clearer class separation is observed on the cleaner KDEF dataset. These findings underscore the trade-off between sensitivity and precision, illustrating how lightweight YOLO models can effectively balance performance and efficiency. The results demonstrate adaptability across both controlled and real-world conditions, establishing these models as strong candidates for real-time, resource-constrained emotion-aware AI applications.

Global Multiple Extraction Network for Low-Resolution Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expression recognition, as a vital computer vision task, is garnering significant attention and undergoing extensive research. Although facial expression recognition algorithms demonstrate impressive performance on high-resolution images, their effectiveness tends to degrade when confronted with low-resolution images. We find it is because: 1) low-resolution images lack detail information; 2) current methods complete weak global modeling, which make it difficult to extract discriminative features. To alleviate the above issues, we proposed a novel global multiple extraction network (GME-Net) for low-resolution facial expression recognition, which incorporates 1) a hybrid attention-based local feature extraction module with attention similarity knowledge distillation to learn image details from high-resolution network; 2) a multi-scale global feature extraction module with quasi-symmetric structure to mitigate the influence of local image noise and facilitate capturing global image features. As a result, our GME-Net is capable of extracting expression-related discriminative features. Extensive experiments conducted on several widely-used datasets demonstrate that the proposed GME-Net can better recognize low-resolution facial expression and obtain superior performance than existing solutions.