Cross-domain few-shot facial expression recognition (CF-FER) aims to adapt models trained on basic expressions to recognize novel compound expressions using only a few annotated examples. Although vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise in few-shot learning, their application to CF-FER remains challenging due to two key issues: coarse-grained textual prompts that fail to capture subtle variations among compound expressions, and episodic training that tends to overfit on highly overlapping few-shot tasks. To address these issues, we propose a fine-grained self-paced relational preserving network (FSR-Net), which introduces fine-grained action unit (AU)-aware textual descriptions generated by large language models (LLMs) to enrich semantic representations and provide more discriminative prototypes. Based on this, we introduce a self-paced relational preserving regularization (SPR) strategy that leverages structural discrepancies between teacher-student visual features and textual-enhanced prototypes as reliability indicators. By progressively weighting reliable samples while filtering out harder ones, the regularization strategy explicitly preserves relational consistency across samples and mitigates overfitting in CF-FER. Comprehensive experiments on multiple CF-FER benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of FSR-Net, yielding average improvements of 5.78% (1-shot) and 3.80% (5-shot) over prior state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate its superior capacity for capturing subtle expression cues and enhancing cross-domain transferability.
Kaiyun Wang, Rui Ding, Hanzi Wang et al.· IEEE Transactions on Image P...· 0 citations
Recently, cross-domain few-shot facial expression recognition (CF-FER) has received considerable attention. However, the performance of existing CF-FER methods is still unsatisfactory due to inferior transferable feature learning under large domain discrepancy and limited target samples. Fortunately, the action units (AUs), which indicate the movements of different facial muscles, provide consistent conceptual semantics for describing expressions within and across domains. Inspired by this, we propose a novel Action Unit-based Consistency-aware Hypergraph Network (AUCH-Net), which constructs consistency-aware hypergraphs on AUs, for CF-FER. Specifically, AUCH-Net presents a new AU feature learning (AFL) module and a new visual feature learning (VFL) module. The AFL module learns AU features under the guidance of a novel relation consistency loss and an AU regularization loss, while the VFL module learns visual features supervised by a relation consistency loss and a classification loss. By learning consistent AU features, AUCH-Net effectively models the connections between AUs and expression categories. As a result, we can bridge the gap between fine-grained facial variations and high-level expression categories, greatly facilitating the learning of transferable feature representations.Extensive experiments on both in-the-lab and in-the-wild datasets show that our method consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. Our results clearly show that modeling the relationships among AUs holds significant potential for FER under cross-domain few-shot scenarios.
Xin-Han Qiu, Yan Yan, Rui Zhu et al.· IEEE transactions on multime...· 0 citations
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