# POSTER: A Pyramid Cross-Fusion Transformer Network for Facial Expression Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.04083 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04083/

## Key facts

- Cited by 49 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09838/) (2020)
- [MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08221/) (2016)
- [AffectNet: A Database for Facial Expression, Valence, and Arousal Computing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03985/) (2017)
- [Challenges in Representation Learning: A report on three machine learning contests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1307.0414/) (2013)
- [Deep Facial Expression Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08348/) (2018)
- [Training Deep Networks for Facial Expression Recognition with Crowd-Sourced Label Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01041/) (2016)
- [Suppressing Uncertainties for Large-Scale Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10392/) (2020)
- [Region Attention Networks for Pose and Occlusion Robust Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04075/) (2019)
- [Dive into Ambiguity: Latent Distribution Mining and Pairwise Uncertainty Estimation for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00232/) (2021)
- [TransFER: Learning Relation-aware Facial Expression Representations with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11116/) (2021)
- [Pixel-in-Pixel Net: Towards Efficient Facial Landmark Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03771/) (2020)
- [Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning for Effective Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05160/) (2021)
- [Face.evoLVe: A High-Performance Face Recognition Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08621/) (2021)
- [Learning to Amend Facial Expression Representation via De-albino and Affinity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10189/) (2021)
- [Learning Vision Transformer with Squeeze and Excitation for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03107/) (2021)
- [Facial Expression Recognition Using Enhanced Deep 3D Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07871/) (2017)
- [Facial Expression Recognition using Facial Landmark Detection and Feature Extraction via Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04510/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [From Static to Dynamic: Adapting Landmark-Aware Image Models for Facial Expression Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05447/) (2023)
- [GPT-4V with Emotion: A Zero-shot Benchmark for Generalized Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04293/) (2023)
- [POSTER++: A simpler and stronger facial expression recognition network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12149/) (2023)
- [Facial Action Unit Detection and Intensity Estimation from Self-supervised Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15878/) (2022)
- [CILF-CIAE: CLIP-driven Image-Language Fusion for Correcting Inverse Age Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01758/) (2023)
- [BAH Dataset for Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition in Videos for Digital Behavioural Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19328/) (2025)
- [Guided Interpretable Facial Expression Recognition via Spatial Action Unit Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00281/) (2024)
- [Emotion Separation and Recognition from a Facial Expression by Generating the Poker Face with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11081/) (2022)
- [ARBEx: Attentive Feature Extraction with Reliability Balancing for Robust Facial Expression Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01486/) (2023)
- [ResEmoteNet: Bridging Accuracy and Loss Reduction in Facial Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10545/) (2024)
- [AffectNet+: A Database for Enhancing Facial Expression Recognition with Soft-Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22506/) (2024)
- [PAtt-Lite: Lightweight Patch and Attention MobileNet for Challenging Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09626/) (2023)
- [GestFormer: Multiscale Wavelet Pooling Transformer Network for Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11180/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Affect Analysis: A Protocol for Ensuring Fairness and Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02164/) (2024)
- [Facial Affect Recognition based on Transformer Encoder and Audiovisual Fusion for the ABAW5 Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09158/) (2023)
- [Faces of Fairness: Examining Bias in Facial Expression Recognition Datasets and Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11049/) (2025)
- [Facial Expression Analysis and Its Potentials in IoT Systems: A Contemporary Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17616/) (2024)
- [OpenFace 3.0: A Lightweight Multitask System for Comprehensive Facial Behavior Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02891/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Prompt Alignment for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21017/) (2025)
- [Emotic Masked Autoencoder with Attention Fusion for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13039/) (2024)
- [Knowledge-Enhanced Facial Expression Recognition with Emotional-to-Neutral Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08598/) (2024)
- [Efficient Neural Architecture Search for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13653/) (2023)
- [QAFE-Net: Quality Assessment of Facial Expressions with Landmark Heatmaps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00856/) (2023)
- [Batch Transformer: Look for Attention in Batch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04218/) (2024)
- [Facial Affect Recognition based on Multi Architecture Encoder and Feature Fusion for the ABAW7 Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12258/) (2024)
- [Spatial Action Unit Cues for Interpretable Deep Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01848/) (2024)
- [Exp-Graph: How Connections Learn Facial Attributes in Graph-based Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14608/) (2025)
- [Authentic Emotion Mapping: Benchmarking Facial Expressions in Real News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13493/) (2024)
- [Compound Expression Recognition via Multi Model Ensemble for the ABAW7 Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12257/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Gaps: Utilizing Unlabeled Face Recognition Datasets to Boost Semi-Supervised Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17622/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Facial expression recognition (FER) is an important task in computer vision, having practical applications in areas such as human-computer interaction, education, healthcare, and online monitoring. In this challenging FER task, there are three key issues especially prevalent: inter-class similarity, intra-class discrepancy, and scale sensitivity. While existing works typically address some of these issues, none have fully addressed all three challenges in a unified framework. In this paper, we propose a two-stream Pyramid crOss-fuSion TransformER network (POSTER), that aims to holistically solve all three issues. Specifically, we design a transformer-based cross-fusion method that enables effective collaboration of facial landmark features and image features to maximize proper attention to salient facial regions. Furthermore, POSTER employs a pyramid structure to promote scale invariance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our POSTER achieves new state-of-the-art results on RAF-DB (92.05%), FERPlus (91.62%), as well as AffectNet 7 class (67.31%) and 8 class (63.34%). The code is available at https://github.com/zczcwh/POSTER.