Hierarchical Vision-Language Interaction for Facial Action Unit Detection

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Hauptverfasser: Li, Yong, Ren, Yi, Zhang, Yizhe, Zhang, Wenhua, Zhang, Tianyi, Jiang, Muyun, Xie, Guo-Sen, Guan, Cuntai
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Li, Yong
Ren, Yi
Zhang, Yizhe
Zhang, Wenhua
Zhang, Tianyi
Jiang, Muyun
Xie, Guo-Sen
Guan, Cuntai
author_facet Li, Yong
Ren, Yi
Zhang, Yizhe
Zhang, Wenhua
Zhang, Tianyi
Jiang, Muyun
Xie, Guo-Sen
Guan, Cuntai
contents Facial Action Unit (AU) detection seeks to recognize subtle facial muscle activations as defined by the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). A primary challenge w.r.t AU detection is the effective learning of discriminative and generalizable AU representations under conditions of limited annotated data. To address this, we propose a Hierarchical Vision-language Interaction for AU Understanding (HiVA) method, which leverages textual AU descriptions as semantic priors to guide and enhance AU detection. Specifically, HiVA employs a large language model to generate diverse and contextually rich AU descriptions to strengthen language-based representation learning. To capture both fine-grained and holistic vision-language associations, HiVA introduces an AU-aware dynamic graph module that facilitates the learning of AU-specific visual representations. These features are further integrated within a hierarchical cross-modal attention architecture comprising two complementary mechanisms: Disentangled Dual Cross-Attention (DDCA), which establishes fine-grained, AU-specific interactions between visual and textual features, and Contextual Dual Cross-Attention (CDCA), which models global inter-AU dependencies. This collaborative, cross-modal learning paradigm enables HiVA to leverage multi-grained vision-based AU features in conjunction with refined language-based AU details, culminating in robust and semantically enriched AU detection capabilities. Extensive experiments show that HiVA consistently surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. Besides, qualitative analyses reveal that HiVA produces semantically meaningful activation patterns, highlighting its efficacy in learning robust and interpretable cross-modal correspondences for comprehensive facial behavior analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_14425
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hierarchical Vision-Language Interaction for Facial Action Unit Detection
Li, Yong
Ren, Yi
Zhang, Yizhe
Zhang, Wenhua
Zhang, Tianyi
Jiang, Muyun
Xie, Guo-Sen
Guan, Cuntai
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Facial Action Unit (AU) detection seeks to recognize subtle facial muscle activations as defined by the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). A primary challenge w.r.t AU detection is the effective learning of discriminative and generalizable AU representations under conditions of limited annotated data. To address this, we propose a Hierarchical Vision-language Interaction for AU Understanding (HiVA) method, which leverages textual AU descriptions as semantic priors to guide and enhance AU detection. Specifically, HiVA employs a large language model to generate diverse and contextually rich AU descriptions to strengthen language-based representation learning. To capture both fine-grained and holistic vision-language associations, HiVA introduces an AU-aware dynamic graph module that facilitates the learning of AU-specific visual representations. These features are further integrated within a hierarchical cross-modal attention architecture comprising two complementary mechanisms: Disentangled Dual Cross-Attention (DDCA), which establishes fine-grained, AU-specific interactions between visual and textual features, and Contextual Dual Cross-Attention (CDCA), which models global inter-AU dependencies. This collaborative, cross-modal learning paradigm enables HiVA to leverage multi-grained vision-based AU features in conjunction with refined language-based AU details, culminating in robust and semantically enriched AU detection capabilities. Extensive experiments show that HiVA consistently surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. Besides, qualitative analyses reveal that HiVA produces semantically meaningful activation patterns, highlighting its efficacy in learning robust and interpretable cross-modal correspondences for comprehensive facial behavior analysis.
title Hierarchical Vision-Language Interaction for Facial Action Unit Detection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14425