Papers › Adaptively Learning Facial Expression Representation via C-F Labels and Distillation

Adaptively Learning Facial Expression Representation via C-F Labels and Distillation

13 Jan 2021IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 2021 1archive 2025-07-28

Hangyu Li; Nannan Wang; Xinpeng Ding; Xi Yang; Xinbo Gao

Facial expression recognition is of significant importance in criminal investigation and digital entertainment. Under unconstrained conditions, existing expression datasets are highly class-imbalanced, and the similarity between expressions is high. Previous methods tend to improve the performance of facial expression recognition through deeper or wider network structures, resulting in increased storage and computing costs. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive supervised objective named AdaReg loss, re-weighting category importance coefficients to address this class imbalance and increasing the discrimination power of expression representations. Inspired by human beings’ cognitive mode, an innovative coarse-fine (C-F) labels strategy is designed to guide the model from easy to difficult to classify highly similar representations. On this basis, we propose a novel training framework named the emotional education mechanism (EEM) to transfer knowledge, composed of a knowledgeable teacher network (KTN) and a self-taught student network (STSN). Specifically, KTN integrates the outputs of coarse and fine streams, learning expression representations from easy to difficult. Under the supervision of the pre-trained KTN and existing learning experience, STSN can maximize the potential performance and compress the original KTN. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to current state-of-the-art frameworks with 88.07% on RAF-DB, 63.97% on AffectNet and 90.49% on FERPlus.

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Tasks

Facial Expression RecognitionFacial Expression Recognition (FER)

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Facial Expression Recognition (FER) FER+ KTN Accuracy 90.49 #6 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Facial Expression Recognition (FER) FERPlus KTN Accuracy(pretrained) 90.49 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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