Facial-R1: Aligning Reasoning and Recognition for Facial Emotion Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wu, Jiulong, Shen, Yucheng, Yan, Lingyong, Sun, Haixin, Xia, Deguo, Huang, Jizhou, Cao, Min
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Wu, Jiulong
Shen, Yucheng
Yan, Lingyong
Sun, Haixin
Xia, Deguo
Huang, Jizhou
Cao, Min
author_facet Wu, Jiulong
Shen, Yucheng
Yan, Lingyong
Sun, Haixin
Xia, Deguo
Huang, Jizhou
Cao, Min
contents Facial Emotion Analysis (FEA) extends traditional facial emotion recognition by incorporating explainable, fine-grained reasoning. The task integrates three subtasks: emotion recognition, facial Action Unit (AU) recognition, and AU-based emotion reasoning to model affective states jointly. While recent approaches leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and achieve promising results, they face two critical limitations: (1) hallucinated reasoning, where VLMs generate plausible but inaccurate explanations due to insufficient emotion-specific knowledge; and (2) misalignment between emotion reasoning and recognition, caused by fragmented connections between observed facial features and final labels. We propose Facial-R1, a three-stage alignment framework that effectively addresses both challenges with minimal supervision. First, we employ instruction fine-tuning to establish basic emotional reasoning capability. Second, we introduce reinforcement training guided by emotion and AU labels as reward signals, which explicitly aligns the generated reasoning process with the predicted emotion. Third, we design a data synthesis pipeline that iteratively leverages the prior stages to expand the training dataset, enabling scalable self-improvement of the model. Built upon this framework, we introduce FEA-20K, a benchmark dataset comprising 17,737 training and 1,688 test samples with fine-grained emotion analysis annotations. Extensive experiments across eight standard benchmarks demonstrate that Facial-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance in FEA, with strong generalization and robust interpretability.
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Facial-R1: Aligning Reasoning and Recognition for Facial Emotion Analysis
Wu, Jiulong
Shen, Yucheng
Yan, Lingyong
Sun, Haixin
Xia, Deguo
Huang, Jizhou
Cao, Min
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Facial Emotion Analysis (FEA) extends traditional facial emotion recognition by incorporating explainable, fine-grained reasoning. The task integrates three subtasks: emotion recognition, facial Action Unit (AU) recognition, and AU-based emotion reasoning to model affective states jointly. While recent approaches leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and achieve promising results, they face two critical limitations: (1) hallucinated reasoning, where VLMs generate plausible but inaccurate explanations due to insufficient emotion-specific knowledge; and (2) misalignment between emotion reasoning and recognition, caused by fragmented connections between observed facial features and final labels. We propose Facial-R1, a three-stage alignment framework that effectively addresses both challenges with minimal supervision. First, we employ instruction fine-tuning to establish basic emotional reasoning capability. Second, we introduce reinforcement training guided by emotion and AU labels as reward signals, which explicitly aligns the generated reasoning process with the predicted emotion. Third, we design a data synthesis pipeline that iteratively leverages the prior stages to expand the training dataset, enabling scalable self-improvement of the model. Built upon this framework, we introduce FEA-20K, a benchmark dataset comprising 17,737 training and 1,688 test samples with fine-grained emotion analysis annotations. Extensive experiments across eight standard benchmarks demonstrate that Facial-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance in FEA, with strong generalization and robust interpretability.
title Facial-R1: Aligning Reasoning and Recognition for Facial Emotion Analysis
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10254