arXiv Machine Learning

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

arXiv:2608. 08873v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) is an important task that has significant implications across various fields such as biometrics, health, and human-computer interaction.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Occlusion-Robust Multimodal Emotion Recognition in VR via Fusion of Facial Images and EMG

The paper presents a method for emotion recognition in virtual reality where head‑mounted displays occlude the upper face. By fusing lower‑face video with electromyography (EMG) signals from the occluded upper face, the authors achieve a 51% macro‑F1 score across seven emotional categories, outperforming image‑only and EMG‑only baselines. A new synchronized multimodal dataset from 20 participants is introduced and will be shared under an ethical‑use agreement.

By Birgit Nierula, Karam Tomotaki-Dawoud, Mert Akguel, Mustafa Tevfik Lafci, David Przewozny, Anna Hilsmann, Peter Eisert, Sebastian Bosse
arXiv AI
Sep 10

RAFM-SER++: A Lightweight Multimodal Emotion Recognition Framework for Real-Time Behavioral Monitoring in Surveillance Systems

The paper introduces RAFM-SER++, a lightweight multimodal speech emotion recognition framework designed for real‑time surveillance systems. It replaces heavy bidirectional cross‑modal transformers with an asymmetric Residual Attention Fusion Mechanism that injects affective speech cues into text representations via a one‑directional residual attention pathway. Experiments on IEMOCAP and ESD show RAFM‑SER++ outperforms the HuBERT‑Base baseline and MemoCMT, reducing trainable parameters by over 60%, achieving 79.60 it/s inference speed, and reaching BACC scores of 81.10% on IEMOCAP and 95.39% on ESD.

By Ngo Truong Dinh, Tung-Lam Bui, Chi-Trung Duong, Vien Nguyen Thi, Viet-Anh Nguyen, Phuc-Lu Le
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

Decoding Affective Nuances: Enhancing MLLMs via Hierarchical Emotion Reasoning and Contrastive Discriminative Pruning

The paper introduces DAN, a training‑free inference‑time framework that improves affective reasoning in multimodal large language models. It combines a Hierarchical Emotional Reasoning Chain (HERC) to better capture fine‑grained visual cues and a Contrastive Discriminative Visual Pruning (CDVP) module to isolate discriminative tokens for semantically similar emotions. Experiments show significant gains, notably a +10.47% improvement on the WebEmo25 benchmark with Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct.

By Cheng Ye, Weidong Chen, Zhaobo Qi, Beier Zhu, Zhendong Mao
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Reweighting Framewise Attention in Video Transformers for Facial Expression Understanding

The paper introduces MiRA, a plug‑in framework that reweights framewise attention in Vision Transformer video models to better capture subtle facial dynamics for expression recognition. MiRA computes frame‑level confidence and intra‑frame concentration from self‑attention maps, redistributing attention toward localized facial cues without adding trainable parameters. Two modes—an exact post‑softmax redistribution and a lightweight flashLite pre‑softmax approximation—are proposed, and experiments on facial expression recognition benchmarks show consistent gains over strong ViT baselines.

By Seongro Yoon, Donghyeon Cho, Jinsun Park, Fran\c{c}ois Br\'emond