OmniMER: Indonesian Multimodal Emotion Recognition via Auxiliary-Enhanced LLM Adaptation

Indonesian, spoken by over 200 million people, remains underserved in multimodal emotion recognition research despite its dominant presence on Southeast Asian social media platforms. We introduce IndoMER, the first multimodal emotion recognition benchmark for Indonesian, comprising 1,944 video segments from 203 speakers with temporally aligned text, audio, and visual annotations across seven emotion categories. The dataset exhibits realistic challenges including cross-modal inconsistency and long-tailed class distributions shaped by Indonesian cultural communication norms. To address these challenges, we propose OmniMER, a multimodal adaptation framework built upon Qwen2.5-Omni that enhances emotion recognition through three auxiliary modality-specific perception tasks: emotion keyword extraction for text, facial expression analysis for video, and prosody analysis for audio. These auxiliary tasks help the model identify emotion-relevant cues in each modality before fusion, reducing reliance on spurious correlations in low-resource settings. Experiments on IndoMER show that OmniMER achieves 0.582 Macro-F1 on sentiment classification and 0.454 on emotion recognition, outperforming the base model by 7.6 and 22.1 absolute points respectively. Cross-lingual evaluation on the Chinese CH-SIMS dataset further demonstrates the generalizability of the proposed framework. The dataset and code are publicly available. https://github.com/yanxm01/INDOMER

CLIP-FTI: Fine-Grained Face Template Inversion via CLIP-Driven Attribute Conditioning

Face recognition systems store face templates for efficient matching. Once leaked, these templates pose a threat: inverting them can yield photorealistic surrogates that compromise privacy and enable impersonation. Although existing research has achieved relatively realistic face template inversion, the reconstructed facial images exhibit over-smoothed facial-part attributes (eyes, nose, mouth) and limited transferability. To address this problem, we present CLIP-FTI, a CLIP-driven fine-grained attribute conditioning framework for face template inversion. Our core idea is to use the CLIP model to obtain the semantic embeddings of facial features, in order to realize the reconstruction of specific facial feature attributes. Specifically, facial feature attribute embeddings extracted from CLIP are fused with the leaked template via a cross-modal feature interaction network and projected into the intermediate latent space of a pretrained StyleGAN. The StyleGAN generator then synthesizes face images with the same identity as the templates but with more fine-grained facial feature attributes. Experiments across multiple face recognition backbones and datasets show that our reconstructions (i) achieve higher identification accuracy and attribute similarity, (ii) recover sharper component-level attribute semantics, and (iii) improve cross-model attack transferability compared to prior reconstruction attacks. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first method to use additional information besides the face template attack to realize face template inversion and obtains SOTA results.

Emotion Recognition in Signers

Recognition of signers' emotions suffers from one theoretical challenge and one practical challenge, namely, the overlap between grammatical and affective facial expressions and the scarcity of data for model training. This paper addresses these two challenges in a cross-lingual setting using our eJSL dataset, a new benchmark dataset for emotion recognition in Japanese Sign Language signers, and BOBSL, a large British Sign Language dataset with subtitles. In eJSL, two signers expressed 78 distinct utterances with each of seven different emotional states, resulting in 1,092 video clips. We empirically demonstrate that 1) textual emotion recognition in spoken language mitigates data scarcity in sign language, 2) temporal segment selection has a significant impact, and 3) incorporating hand motion enhances emotion recognition in signers. Finally we establish a stronger baseline than spoken language LLMs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.