The key to facial expression recognition is to learn discriminative spatial-temporal representations that embed facial expression dynamics. Previous studies predominantly rely on pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to learn facial appearance representations, overlooking the relationships between facial regions. To address this issue, this paper presents an Appearance- and Relation-aware Parallel Graph attention fusion Network (ARPGNet) to learn mutually enhanced spatial-temporal representations of appearance and relation information. Specifically, we construct a facial region relation graph and leverage the graph attention mechanism to model the relationships between facial regions. The resulting relational representation sequences, along with CNN-based appearance representation sequences, are then fed into a parallel graph attention fusion module for mutual interaction and enhancement. This module simultaneously explores the complementarity between different representation sequences and the temporal dynamics within each sequence. Experimental results on three facial expression recognition datasets demonstrate that the proposed ARPGNet outperforms or is comparable to state-of-the-art methods.

Our pipeline introduces three innovative components.

The proliferation of facial recognition systems presents major privacy risks, driving the need for effective countermeasures. Current adversarial techniques apply generalized methods rather than adapting to individual facial characteristics, limiting their effectiveness and inconspicuousness. In this work, we introduce Layer Embedding Activation Mapping (LEAM), a novel technique that identifies which facial areas contribute most to recognition at an individual level. Unlike adversarial attack methods that aim to fool recognition systems, LEAM is an explainability technique designed to understand how these systems work, providing insights that could inform future privacy protection research. We integrate LEAM with a face parser to analyze data from 1000 individuals across 9 pre-trained facial recognition models. Our analysis reveals that while different layers within facial recognition models vary significantly in their focus areas, these models generally prioritize similar facial regions across architectures when considering their overall activation patterns, which show significantly higher similarity between images of the same individual (Bhattacharyya Coefficient: 0.32-0.57) vs. different individuals (0.04-0.13), validating the existence of person-specific recognition patterns. Our results show that facial recognition models prioritize the central region of face images (with nose areas accounting for 18.9-29.7% of critical recognition regions), while still distributing attention across multiple facial fragments. Proper selection of relevant facial areas was confirmed using validation occlusions, based on just 1% of the most relevant, LEAM-identified, image pixels, which proved to be transferable across different models. Our findings establish the foundation for future individually tailored privacy protection systems centered around LEAM's choice of areas to be perturbed.

Recent advances in talking face generation have significantly improved facial animation synthesis. However, existing approaches face fundamental limitations: 3DMM-based methods maintain temporal consistency but lack fine-grained regional control, while Stable Diffusion-based methods enable spatial manipulation but suffer from temporal inconsistencies. The integration of these approaches is hindered by incompatible control mechanisms and semantic entanglement of facial representations. This paper presents DisentTalk, introducing a data-driven semantic disentanglement framework that decomposes 3DMM expression parameters into meaningful subspaces for fine-grained facial control. Building upon this disentangled representation, we develop a hierarchical latent diffusion architecture that operates in 3DMM parameter space, integrating region-aware attention mechanisms to ensure both spatial precision and temporal coherence. To address the scarcity of high-quality Chinese training data, we introduce CHDTF, a Chinese high-definition talking face dataset. Extensive experiments show superior performance over existing methods across multiple metrics, including lip synchronization, expression quality, and temporal consistency. Project Page: https://kangweiiliu.github.io/DisentTalk.

Face Recognition (FR) has advanced significantly with the development of deep learning, achieving high accuracy in several applications. However, the lack of interpretability of these systems raises concerns about their accountability, fairness, and reliability. In the present study, we propose an interactive framework to enhance the explainability of FR models by combining model-agnostic Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. The proposed framework is able to accurately answer various questions of the user through an interactive chatbot. In particular, the explanations generated by our proposed method are in the form of natural language text and visual representations, which for example can describe how different facial regions contribute to the similarity measure between two faces. This is achieved through the automatic analysis of the output's saliency heatmaps of the face images and a BERT question-answering model, providing users with an interface that facilitates a comprehensive understanding of the FR decisions. The proposed approach is interactive, allowing the users to ask questions to get more precise information based on the user's background knowledge. More importantly, in contrast to previous studies, our solution does not decrease the face recognition performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method through different experiments, highlighting its potential to make FR systems more interpretable and user-friendly, especially in sensitive applications where decision-making transparency is crucial.

Recognition of low-quality face images remains a challenge due to invisible or deformation in partial facial regions. For low-quality images dominated by missing partial facial regions, local region similarity contributes more to face recognition (FR). Conversely, in cases dominated by local face deformation, excessive attention to local regions may lead to misjudgments, while global features exhibit better robustness. However, most of the existing FR methods neglect the bias in feature quality of low-quality images introduced by different factors. To address this issue, we propose a Local and Global Feature Attention Fusion (LGAF) network based on feature quality. The network adaptively allocates attention between local and global features according to feature quality and obtains more discriminative and high-quality face features through local and global information complementarity. In addition, to effectively obtain fine-grained information at various scales and increase the separability of facial features in high-dimensional space, we introduce a Multi-Head Multi-Scale Local Feature Extraction (MHMS) module. Experimental results demonstrate that the LGAF achieves the best average performance on $4$ validation sets (CFP-FP, CPLFW, AgeDB, and CALFW), and the performance on TinyFace and SCFace outperforms the state-of-the-art methods (SoTA).

The increased interest in developing next-gen social robots has raised questions about the factors affecting the perception of robot emotions. This study investigates the impact of robot appearances (humanlike, mechanical) and face regions (full-face, eye-region) on human perception of robot emotions. A between-subjects user study (N = 305) was conducted where participants were asked to identify the emotions being displayed in videos of robot faces, as well as a human baseline. Our findings reveal three important insights for effective social robot face design in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI): Firstly, robots equipped with a back-projected, fully animated face - regardless of whether they are more human-like or more mechanical-looking - demonstrate a capacity for emotional expression comparable to that of humans. Secondly, the recognition accuracy of emotional expressions in both humans and robots declines when only the eye region is visible. Lastly, within the constraint of only the eye region being visible, robots with more human-like features significantly enhance emotion recognition.

Diffusion-based technologies have made significant strides, particularly in personalized and customized facialgeneration. However, existing methods face challenges in achieving high-fidelity and detailed identity (ID)consistency, primarily due to insufficient fine-grained control over facial areas and the lack of a comprehensive strategy for ID preservation by fully considering intricate facial details and the overall face. To address these limitations, we introduce ConsistentID, an innovative method crafted for diverseidentity-preserving portrait generation under fine-grained multimodal facial prompts, utilizing only a single reference image. ConsistentID comprises two key components: a multimodal facial prompt generator that combines facial features, corresponding facial descriptions and the overall facial context to enhance precision in facial details, and an ID-preservation network optimized through the facial attention localization strategy, aimed at preserving ID consistency in facial regions. Together, these components significantly enhance the accuracy of ID preservation by introducing fine-grained multimodal ID information from facial regions. To facilitate training of ConsistentID, we present a fine-grained portrait dataset, FGID, with over 500,000 facial images, offering greater diversity and comprehensiveness than existing public facial datasets. % such as LAION-Face, CelebA, FFHQ, and SFHQ. Experimental results substantiate that our ConsistentID achieves exceptional precision and diversity in personalized facial generation, surpassing existing methods in the MyStyle dataset. Furthermore, while ConsistentID introduces more multimodal ID information, it maintains a fast inference speed during generation.

Animatronic robots aim to enable natural human-robot interaction through lifelike facial expressions. However, generating realistic, speech-synchronized robot expressions is challenging due to the complexities of facial biomechanics and responsive motion synthesis. This paper presents a principled, skinning-centric approach to drive animatronic robot facial expressions from speech. The proposed approach employs linear blend skinning (LBS) as the core representation to guide tightly integrated innovations in embodiment design and motion synthesis. LBS informs the actuation topology, enables human expression retargeting, and allows speech-driven facial motion generation. The proposed approach is capable of generating highly realistic, real-time facial expressions from speech on an animatronic face, significantly advancing robots' ability to replicate nuanced human expressions for natural interaction.