Papers › Revisiting Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Facial Expression Recognition

Revisiting Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Facial Expression Recognition

8 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.03853archive 2025-07-28

Yuxuan Shu, Xiao Gu, Guang-Zhong Yang, Benny Lo

The success of most advanced facial expression recognition works relies heavily on large-scale annotated datasets. However, it poses great challenges in acquiring clean and consistent annotations for facial expression datasets. On the other hand, self-supervised contrastive learning has gained great popularity due to its simple yet effective instance discrimination training strategy, which can potentially circumvent the annotation issue. Nevertheless, there remain inherent disadvantages of instance-level discrimination, which are even more challenging when faced with complicated facial representations. In this paper, we revisit the use of self-supervised contrastive learning and explore three core strategies to enforce expression-specific representations and to minimize the interference from other facial attributes, such as identity and face styling. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods, in terms of both categorical and dimensional facial expression recognition tasks.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

ClaudiaShu/SSL-FER officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Contrastive LearningFacial Expression RecognitionFacial Expression Recognition (FER)Self-Supervised Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Contrastive Learning

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections