Facial Expression Recognition

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Overview

Facial expression recognition (FER) aims to identify visible expressions, estimate continuous affect such as valence and arousal, and detect fine-grained facial actions, including brief micro-expressions. Methods range from convolutional neural networks and vision transformers to temporal models, action-unit and landmark guidance, and audio-visual or language-assisted systems; common evaluations use datasets such as AffectNet, RAF-DB, DFEW, and CASME II. Current work addresses real-world challenges with domain adaptation, synthetic data, efficient token selection, and models that report uncertainty or explain their predictions. A central tension is that expressions can be ambiguous and culturally or individually variable, while many benchmarks impose fixed labels, so robustness, fairness, privacy, and meaningful evaluation remain open concerns.

Latest papers

CardsList

79 papers5 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. GM-GReFEL: Geometry-Guided Spatiotemporal State-Space Learning for Robust Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition

    Oct 22, 2026Yudhistira Arditya Pratama, Yi-Zeng HsiehFacial Expression RecognitionVisual SSMs

    Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei 106335, Taiwan

  2. When, Where, and Why: Hierarchical Causal Explainability for Video Face Understanding with MLLMs

    Oct 13, 2026Anubhav Kataria, Shreya Ghosh, Jingwen Ye +1VLM InterpretabilityFacial Expression Recognition

    Monash University, Melbourne, Australia · Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India

  3. Whose Face Is It Anyway? A Multi-Model Audit of Facial Affect Recognition on Children, and Why the Gap Is the Head, Not the Features

    Oct 6, 2026Tobias Hallmen, Robin-Nico Kampa, Elisabeth AndréDomain AdaptationFacial Expression Recognition

    Chair for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, University of Augsburg · Institute for Distributed Intelligent Systems, University of the Bundeswehr Munich

  4. The Failure Is in the Readout: Fine-Grained Emotion Recognition Benchmarks Measure Elicitation, Not Perception

    Oct 6, 2026Tobias Hallmen, Fabian Deuser, Robin-Nico Kampa +2VLM EvaluationFacial Expression Recognition

    Chair for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, University of Augsburg · Institute for Distributed Intelligent Systems, University of the Bundeswehr Munich

  5. Capturing Dynamics: The 4D Facial Expression Intensity Dataset

    Oct 2, 2026Zesheng Wang, Alexandre Bruckert, Pierre Lebreton +3Facial Expression Recognition

    École Centrale Nantes, CNRS, LS2N, UMR 6004 Nantes Université, France · Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis University of Oulu, Finland

  6. Toward individual-level calibration in affect recognition with perceptual adjustment queries

    Sep 17, 2026Xuanzhou Chen, Sankaraleengam Alagapan, Ashwin PananjadyFacial Expression Recognition

    Electrical and Computer Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, United States · Industrial and Systems Engineering Electrical and Computer Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, United States

  7. When Do Language-Grounded Explanations Help? A Graph-Bottleneck for Farm Monitoring Interpretable Sheep Facial Pain

    Sep 17, 2026Alam Noor, Miguel Guti'errez Gait'anConcept Bottleneck ModelsFacial Expression Recognition

    CISTER Research Center, Porto, Portugal. · Department of Electrical Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Cat´olica de Chile, Santiago 7820436, Chile.

  8. Predicting Human Disagreement for Calibrated Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition

    Sep 15, 2026Yiming Wang, Frederick W. B. Li, Jingyun WangAnnotator DisagreementUncertainty Quantification

    Department of Computer Science, Durham University

  9. Event-Level Emotion Recognition in the Wild Using Deep Facial Expression Analysis

    Sep 12, 2026Aleksandr Semerikov, Pakizar ShamoiEmotion RecognitionFacial Expression Recognition

    School of Information Technology and Engineering Kazakh-British Technical University Almaty, Kazakhstan

  10. A Comprehensive Review of Multimodal Facial State Analysis: Tasks, Methods, and Resources

    Sep 6, 2026Xuri Ge, Tianshuo Zhang, Ruihan Li +6Facial Expression RecognitionFacial Action Unit Detection

    Shandong University, Qingdao Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, Shandong, China · University of Glasgow, United Kingdom · Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

  11. 3D Weighted Geometric Graph Neural Networks for Sheep Facial Pain Assessment

    Aug 11, 2026Alam Noor, Luis Almeida, Mohamed DaoudiGraph Neural NetworksGeometric Representation Learning

    CISTER Research Center, Porto, Portugal · Faculty of Engineering University of Porto, Portugal · Univ. Lille, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 CRIStal, Lille, F-59000, France +1

  12. Sparse Attention to Emotion: Efficient Facial Emotion Recognition via Token Reduction

    Aug 9, 2026Aya Manel Zitouni, Aicha Zenakhri, Karim Haroun +1Efficient ViTsFacial Expression Recognition

    LIASD Laboratory, University of Paris 8, France

  13. SRE-FER: Regional residual evidence learning for mitigating local evidence dilution in fine-grained facial expression recognition

    Aug 9, 2026Jiaye Song, Ruochen Zhang, Yuliang Wang +1Residual LearningFacial Expression Recognition

    Tiangong University, No. 399 Binshuixi Road, Xiqing District, Tianjin 300387, China

  14. Test-Time Adaptation with Online Personalized Energy-Based Cache for Fine-Grained Video Expression Recognition

    Aug 6, 2026Masoumeh Sharafi, Muhammad Osama Zeeshan, Soufiane Belharbi +3Test-Time AdaptationVLM Adaptation

    LIVIA, Department of Systems Engineering, École de technologie supérieure, Montreal, Canada · LIVIA, Department of Software and IT Engineering, École de technologie supérieure, Montreal, Canada

  15. AUCH-Net: Action Unit-Based Consistency-Aware Hypergraph Network for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Facial Expression Recognition

    Jul 23, 2026Xinhan Qiu, Yan Yan, Rui Zhu +2Few-Shot LearningCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, School of Informatics, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361102, China · Fujian Key Laboratory of Pattern Recognition and Image Understanding, Xiamen University of Technology, Xiamen 361024, China · Bayes Business School, City St George’s, University of London, London, EC1Y 8TZ, UK +1

  16. Explainable graph attention network for stress recognition (StressGAT) via differential action units

    Jul 23, 2026Thomas Kassiotis, Stefanos Gkikas, Nikolaos Smyrnis +1Graph Attention NetworksFacial Expression Recognition

    Department of Electronic Engineering Hellenic Mediterranean University Chania, Greece · Honda Research Institute Japan Wako City, Japan · University Mental Health, Neurosciences and Precision Medicine, Research Institute “COSTAS STEFANIS” 2nd Department of Psychiatry, Medical School, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Athens, Greece +1

  17. Spatiotemporal Facial Action Unit Detection using Twin Cycle Autoencoders for Driver Monitoring

    Jul 18, 2026Sai Sidharth DAutoencodersFacial Action Unit Detection

  18. AffectFuse: Cross-Task Feature Fusion with Temporal Modeling for Multi-Task Affective Behavior Analysis

    Jul 17, 2026Dipit Saha, Mohammad Raihan Rashid, Shah Mohammad Abdul Mannan +2Multi-Task LearningFacial Action Unit Detection

    Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology

  19. Task-Specific Feature Fusion Method for Multi-Task Affective Behavior Analysis

    Jul 15, 2026Jiajun Sun, Zhe GaoMulti-Task LearningFacial Action Unit Detection

    Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China

  20. AffectFlow-DINO: Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Task Affect Estimation via Conditional Rectified Flow

    Jul 14, 2026Salah Eddine Bekhouche, Abdellah Zakaria Sellam, Fadi Dornaika +1Multi-Task LearningFacial Action Unit Detection

    University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain · Department of Innovation Engineering, University of Salento & Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems (CNR), Italy · Faculty of Data Science and Computing, Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, Malaysia

  21. HSEmotion Team at the 11th ABAW Challenge: Multi-Task Learning and Ambivalence/Hesitancy Video Recognition

    Jul 14, 2026Aleksei Bakin, Andrey V. SavchenkoMulti-Task LearningMultimodal Emotion Recognition

    Central University, Moscow, Russia · Sber AI Lab, Moscow, Russia · HSE University, Laboratory of Algorithms and Technologies for Network Analysis, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

  22. Causal Supervision of Attention for Affective Behaviour Analysis

    Jul 13, 2026Nemanja Rašajski, Konstantinos Makantasis, Antonios Liapis +1Causal Representation LearningFacial Action Unit Detection

    Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta, Malta · AI Department, University of Malta, Malta

  23. AU-Guided Synthetic Video Generation for Micro-Expression Recognition

    Jul 12, 2026Pei-Sze Tan, Sailaja Rajanala, Yee-Fan Tan +2Synthetic Data GenerationFacial Expression Recognition

    CyPhi AI Lab, Monash University Malaysia

  24. AI-guided stimuli discovery and generation to optimize facial emotion perception studies in autism

    Jul 9, 2026Kushin Mukherjee, Na Yeon Kim, Maren Wehrheim +2Autism Spectrum DisorderFacial Expression Recognition

    Centre for Integrative and Applied Neuroscience, York University, Canada · Department of Psychology, Stanford University, USA · Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, USA +2

  25. Enhancing Facial Expression Recognition in Head-Mounted Displays with Synthetic Data

    Jul 5, 2026Jianing Deng, Qiang Zhou, Jingtong HuSynthetic Data AugmentationFacial Expression Recognition

    University of Pittsburgh

  26. Reweighting Framewise Attention in Video Transformers for Facial Expression Understanding

    Jun 29, 2026Seongro Yoon, Donghyeon Cho, Jinsun Park +1Vision TransformerFacial Expression Recognition

    Inria, Université Côte d’Azur, France · Hanyang University, South Korea · Pusan National University, South Korea

  27. STAG: Spatio-temporal Evolving Structural Representation of Action Units for Micro-expression Recognition

    Jun 26, 2026Nandani Sharma, Varun Sharma, Dinesh SinghFacial Expression RecognitionMicro-Expression Recognition

    Vision Intelligence and Machine Learning (VIML) Group, School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, Mandi, 175005, Himachal Pradesh, India · Indian Institute of Information Technology Bhagalpur, Sabour Rd, Bhagalpur, 813210, Bihar, India

  28. TraMP-LLaMA: Generative Interpretability with Decoupled Instruction Tuning for Facial Expression Quality Assessment

    Jun 25, 2026Shuchao Duan, Alan Whone, Hossein Rahmani +2Medical DiagnosisFacial Expression Recognition

    School of Computer Science University of Bristol Bristol, UK · Translational Health Sciences University of Bristol Bristol, UK · School of Computing and Communications Lancaster University Lancaster, UK

  29. SAC2^2-Net: Semantic Anchoring and Complementary-Consensus Fusion for Multimodal Micro-Expression Recognition

    Jun 24, 2026Xuepeng Zheng, Tong Chen, Chaoping Gui +3Cross-Modal AlignmentMultimodal Emotion Recognition

    College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China · Faculty of psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China · Chongqing Key Laboratory of Generic Technology and System of Service Robots, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China +1

  30. Interpretable Uncertainty Routing Separating Emotion Ambiguity from Distribution Shift in Facial Expression Recognition

    Jun 21, 2026Keito Inoshita, Takato UenoUncertainty QuantificationSelective Prediction

    Faculty of Business and Commerce, Kansai University, Suita, Japan · Data Science and AI Innovation Research Promotion Center, Shiga University, Hikone, Japan · Graduate School of Data Science, Shiga University, Hikone, Japan