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Fine-Grained Self-Paced Relational Preserving Network for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Facial Expression Recognition

delete2026-07-28
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PRE
AI
K
Kaiyun Wang
丁锐 (Rui Ding)
H
Hanzi Wang
Y
Yan Yan
DOI:10.1109/tip.2026.3713438delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Cross-domain few-shot facial expression recognition (CF-FER) aims to adapt models trained on basic expressions to recognize novel compound expressions using only a few annotated examples. Although vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise in few-shot learning, their application to CF-FER remains challenging due to two key issues: coarse-grained textual prompts that fail to capture subtle variations among compound expressions, and episodic training that tends to overfit on highly overlapping few-shot tasks. To address these issues, we propose a fine-grained self-paced relational preserving network (FSR-Net), which introduces fine-grained action unit (AU)-aware textual descriptions generated by large language models (LLMs) to enrich semantic representations and provide more discriminative prototypes. Based on this, we introduce a self-paced relational preserving regularization (SPR) strategy that leverages structural discrepancies between teacher-student visual features and textual-enhanced prototypes as reliability indicators. By progressively weighting reliable samples while filtering out harder ones, the regularization strategy explicitly preserves relational consistency across samples and mitigates overfitting in CF-FER. Comprehensive experiments on multiple CF-FER benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of FSR-Net, yielding average improvements of 5.78% (1-shot) and 3.80% (5-shot) over prior state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate its superior capacity for capturing subtle expression cues and enhancing cross-domain transferability.
Keywords:
Compound facial expression recognition
cross-domain few-shot learning
multimodal learning
relation distillation
self-paced learning

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing cover
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
IF:
13.7
Papers:
1.0W
Citations:
8.4W

Organization

X
xiamen university
Scholars:
5.7W
Papers: 3.7W
Citations: 67
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