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.

An Evaluation of a Visual Question Answering Strategy for Zero-shot Facial Expression Recognition in Still Images

Facial expression recognition (FER) is a key research area in computer vision and human-computer interaction. Despite recent advances in deep learning, challenges persist, especially in generalizing to new scenarios. In fact, zero-shot FER significantly reduces the performance of state-of-the-art FER models. To address this problem, the community has recently started to explore the integration of knowledge from Large Language Models for visual tasks. In this work, we evaluate a broad collection of locally executed Visual Language Models (VLMs), avoiding the lack of task-specific knowledge by adopting a Visual Question Answering strategy. We compare the proposed pipeline with state-of-the-art FER models, both integrating and excluding VLMs, evaluating well-known FER benchmarks: AffectNet, FERPlus, and RAF-DB. The results show excellent performance for some VLMs in zero-shot FER scenarios, indicating the need for further exploration to improve FER generalization.

Mitigating Bias in Facial Recognition Systems: Centroid Fairness Loss Optimization

The urging societal demand for fair AI systems has put pressure on the research community to develop predictive models that are not only globally accurate but also meet new fairness criteria, reflecting the lack of disparate mistreatment with respect to sensitive attributes ($\textit{e.g.}$ gender, ethnicity, age). In particular, the variability of the errors made by certain Facial Recognition (FR) systems across specific segments of the population compromises the deployment of the latter, and was judged unacceptable by regulatory authorities. Designing fair FR systems is a very challenging problem, mainly due to the complex and functional nature of the performance measure used in this domain ($\textit{i.e.}$ ROC curves) and because of the huge heterogeneity of the face image datasets usually available for training. In this paper, we propose a novel post-processing approach to improve the fairness of pre-trained FR models by optimizing a regression loss which acts on centroid-based scores. Beyond the computational advantages of the method, we present numerical experiments providing strong empirical evidence of the gain in fairness and of the ability to preserve global accuracy.

The Invisible Threat: Evaluating the Vulnerability of Cross-Spectral Face Recognition to Presentation Attacks

Cross-spectral face recognition systems are designed to enhance the performance of facial recognition systems by enabling cross-modal matching under challenging operational conditions. A particularly relevant application is the matching of near-infrared (NIR) images to visible-spectrum (VIS) images, enabling the verification of individuals by comparing NIR facial captures acquired with VIS reference images. The use of NIR imaging offers several advantages, including greater robustness to illumination variations, better visibility through glasses and glare, and greater resistance to presentation attacks. Despite these claimed benefits, the robustness of NIR-based systems against presentation attacks has not been systematically studied in the literature. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation into the vulnerability of NIR-VIS cross-spectral face recognition systems to presentation attacks. Our empirical findings indicate that, although these systems exhibit a certain degree of reliability, they remain vulnerable to specific attacks, emphasizing the need for further research in this area.

Diffusion-Driven Universal Model Inversion Attack for Face Recognition

Facial recognition technology poses significant privacy risks, as it relies on biometric data that is inherently sensitive and immutable if compromised. To mitigate these concerns, face recognition systems convert raw images into embeddings, traditionally considered privacy-preserving. However, model inversion attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing these private facial images, making them a crucial tool for evaluating the privacy risks of face recognition systems. Existing methods usually require training individual generators for each target model, a computationally expensive process. In this paper, we propose DiffUMI, a training-free diffusion-driven universal model inversion attack for face recognition systems. DiffUMI is the first approach to apply a diffusion model for unconditional image generation in model inversion. Unlike other methods, DiffUMI is universal, eliminating the need for training target-specific generators. It operates within a fixed framework and pretrained diffusion model while seamlessly adapting to diverse target identities and models. DiffUMI breaches privacy-preserving face recognition systems with state-of-the-art success, demonstrating that an unconditional diffusion model, coupled with optimized adversarial search, enables efficient and high-fidelity facial reconstruction. Additionally, we introduce a novel application of out-of-domain detection (OODD), marking the first use of model inversion to distinguish non-face inputs from face inputs based solely on embeddings.

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.

Diffusion-based Adversarial Identity Manipulation for Facial Privacy Protection

The success of face recognition (FR) systems has led to serious privacy concerns due to potential unauthorized surveillance and user tracking on social networks. Existing methods for enhancing privacy fail to generate natural face images that can protect facial privacy. In this paper, we propose diffusion-based adversarial identity manipulation (DiffAIM) to generate natural and highly transferable adversarial faces against malicious FR systems. To be specific, we manipulate facial identity within the low-dimensional latent space of a diffusion model. This involves iteratively injecting gradient-based adversarial identity guidance during the reverse diffusion process, progressively steering the generation toward the desired adversarial faces. The guidance is optimized for identity convergence towards a target while promoting semantic divergence from the source, facilitating effective impersonation while maintaining visual naturalness. We further incorporate structure-preserving regularization to preserve facial structure consistency during manipulation. Extensive experiments on both face verification and identification tasks demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art, DiffAIM achieves stronger black-box attack transferability while maintaining superior visual quality. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for commercial FR APIs, including Face++ and Aliyun.

Attention-aggregated Attack for Boosting the Transferability of Facial Adversarial Examples

Adversarial examples have revealed the vulnerability of deep learning models and raised serious concerns about information security. The transfer-based attack is a hot topic in black-box attacks that are practical to real-world scenarios where the training datasets, parameters, and structure of the target model are unknown to the attacker. However, few methods consider the particularity of class-specific deep models for fine-grained vision tasks, such as face recognition (FR), giving rise to unsatisfactory attacking performance. In this work, we first investigate what in a face exactly contributes to the embedding learning of FR models and find that both decisive and auxiliary facial features are specific to each FR model, which is quite different from the biological mechanism of human visual system. Accordingly we then propose a novel attack method named Attention-aggregated Attack (AAA) to enhance the transferability of adversarial examples against FR, which is inspired by the attention divergence and aims to destroy the facial features that are critical for the decision-making of other FR models by imitating their attentions on the clean face images. Extensive experiments conducted on various FR models validate the superiority and robust effectiveness of the proposed method over existing methods.

Artificial Behavior Intelligence: Technology, Challenges, and Future Directions

Understanding and predicting human behavior has emerged as a core capability in various AI application domains such as autonomous driving, smart healthcare, surveillance systems, and social robotics. This paper defines the technical framework of Artificial Behavior Intelligence (ABI), which comprehensively analyzes and interprets human posture, facial expressions, emotions, behavioral sequences, and contextual cues. It details the essential components of ABI, including pose estimation, face and emotion recognition, sequential behavior analysis, and context-aware modeling. Furthermore, we highlight the transformative potential of recent advances in large-scale pretrained models, such as large language models (LLMs), vision foundation models, and multimodal integration models, in significantly improving the accuracy and interpretability of behavior recognition. Our research team has a strong interest in the ABI domain and is actively conducting research, particularly focusing on the development of intelligent lightweight models capable of efficiently inferring complex human behaviors. This paper identifies several technical challenges that must be addressed to deploy ABI in real-world applications including learning behavioral intelligence from limited data, quantifying uncertainty in complex behavior prediction, and optimizing model structures for low-power, real-time inference. To tackle these challenges, our team is exploring various optimization strategies including lightweight transformers, graph-based recognition architectures, energy-aware loss functions, and multimodal knowledge distillation, while validating their applicability in real-time environments.

MELLM: Exploring LLM-Powered Micro-Expression Understanding Enhanced by Subtle Motion Perception

Micro-expressions (MEs) are crucial psychological responses with significant potential for affective computing. However, current automatic micro-expression recognition (MER) research primarily focuses on discrete emotion classification, neglecting a convincing analysis of the subtle dynamic movements and inherent emotional cues. The rapid progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), known for their strong multimodal comprehension and language generation abilities, offers new possibilities. MLLMs have shown success in various vision-language tasks, indicating their potential to understand MEs comprehensively, including both fine-grained motion patterns and underlying emotional semantics. Nevertheless, challenges remain due to the subtle intensity and short duration of MEs, as existing MLLMs are not designed to capture such delicate frame-level facial dynamics. In this paper, we propose a novel Micro-Expression Large Language Model (MELLM), which incorporates a subtle facial motion perception strategy with the strong inference capabilities of MLLMs, representing the first exploration of MLLMs in the domain of ME analysis. Specifically, to explicitly guide the MLLM toward motion-sensitive regions, we construct an interpretable motion-enhanced color map by fusing onset-apex optical flow dynamics with the corresponding grayscale onset frame as the model input. Additionally, specialized fine-tuning strategies are incorporated to further enhance the model's visual perception of MEs. Furthermore, we construct an instruction-description dataset based on Facial Action Coding System (FACS) annotations and emotion labels to train our MELLM. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model exhibits superior robustness and generalization capabilities in ME understanding (MEU). Code is available at https://github.com/zyzhangUstc/MELLM.