# Facial emotion expressions in human-robot interaction: A survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.07169 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07169/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Optimizing Facial Expressions of an Android Robot Effectively: a Bayesian Optimization Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05620/) (2023)
- [CS3D: An Efficient Facial Expression Recognition via Event Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09592/) (2025)
- [X2C: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Nuanced Humanoid Facial Expression Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11146/) (2025)
- [Point-Supervised Facial Expression Spotting with Gaussian-Based Instance-Adaptive Intensity Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16952/) (2025)
- [UF-AMA: A unified framework for cross-domain emotion recognition via adaptive multimodal alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00170/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Facial expressions are an ideal means of communicating one's emotions or intentions to others. This overview will focus on human facial expression recognition as well as robotic facial expression generation. In the case of human facial expression recognition, both facial expression recognition on predefined datasets as well as in real-time will be covered. For robotic facial expression generation, hand-coded and automated methods i.e., facial expressions of a robot are generated by moving the features (eyes, mouth) of the robot by hand-coding or automatically using machine learning techniques, will also be covered. There are already plenty of studies that achieve high accuracy for emotion expression recognition on predefined datasets, but the accuracy for facial expression recognition in real-time is comparatively lower. In the case of expression generation in robots, while most of the robots are capable of making basic facial expressions, there are not many studies that enable robots to do so automatically. In this overview, state-of-the-art research in facial emotion expressions during human-robot interaction has been discussed leading to several possible directions for future research.