LaCoVL-FER: Landmark-Guided Contrastive Learning Network with Vision-Language Enhancement for Facial Expression Recognition

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Auteurs principaux: Wang, Jiaxin, Jian, Muwei, Yu, Hui, Dong, Junyu, Xia, Yifan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Wang, Jiaxin
Jian, Muwei
Yu, Hui
Dong, Junyu
Xia, Yifan
author_facet Wang, Jiaxin
Jian, Muwei
Yu, Hui
Dong, Junyu
Xia, Yifan
contents Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild is still challenging due to uncontrolled variations in pose, occlusion, and illumination. Most existing attention-based methods primarily rely on visual appearance cues, suffering from attention redundancy and instability, which limits their performance in complex scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a novel landmark-guided contrastive learning network with vision-language enhancement for FER (LaCoVL-FER), which integrates geometric priors from facial landmarks and semantic priors from a vision-language model. Specifically, a Landmark-Guided Adaptive Encoder (LGAE) is designed to introduce geometric priors through a Bi-branch Gated Cross Attention (BGCA) mechanism, which achieves adaptive fusion of landmark-based geometric and visual appearance features to produce expression-relevant features, thereby focusing on key facial regions and suppressing noise interference. In parallel, a Vision-Language Enhancement Strategy (VLES) is presented to leverage the expression-relevant features to refine the generalizable visual features extracted by the frozen pretrained CLIP image encoder, yielding expression-specific visual representations. Based on these representations, an Expression-Conditioned Prompting (ECP) mechanism is utilized to further adapt the textual features of fixed class-level prompts from the frozen pretrained CLIP text encoder, generating more instance-aware textual representations. These visual-textual representations are aligned as semantic priors to enhance the robustness and generalization of FER. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our LaCoVL-FER outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three representative real-world FER datasets, including RAF-DB, FERPlus, and AffectNet. The code is available at https://github.com/ylin06804/LaCoVL-FER.
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LaCoVL-FER: Landmark-Guided Contrastive Learning Network with Vision-Language Enhancement for Facial Expression Recognition
Wang, Jiaxin
Jian, Muwei
Yu, Hui
Dong, Junyu
Xia, Yifan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild is still challenging due to uncontrolled variations in pose, occlusion, and illumination. Most existing attention-based methods primarily rely on visual appearance cues, suffering from attention redundancy and instability, which limits their performance in complex scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a novel landmark-guided contrastive learning network with vision-language enhancement for FER (LaCoVL-FER), which integrates geometric priors from facial landmarks and semantic priors from a vision-language model. Specifically, a Landmark-Guided Adaptive Encoder (LGAE) is designed to introduce geometric priors through a Bi-branch Gated Cross Attention (BGCA) mechanism, which achieves adaptive fusion of landmark-based geometric and visual appearance features to produce expression-relevant features, thereby focusing on key facial regions and suppressing noise interference. In parallel, a Vision-Language Enhancement Strategy (VLES) is presented to leverage the expression-relevant features to refine the generalizable visual features extracted by the frozen pretrained CLIP image encoder, yielding expression-specific visual representations. Based on these representations, an Expression-Conditioned Prompting (ECP) mechanism is utilized to further adapt the textual features of fixed class-level prompts from the frozen pretrained CLIP text encoder, generating more instance-aware textual representations. These visual-textual representations are aligned as semantic priors to enhance the robustness and generalization of FER. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our LaCoVL-FER outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three representative real-world FER datasets, including RAF-DB, FERPlus, and AffectNet. The code is available at https://github.com/ylin06804/LaCoVL-FER.
title LaCoVL-FER: Landmark-Guided Contrastive Learning Network with Vision-Language Enhancement for Facial Expression Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19821