# Learning Diversified Feature Representations for Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.09381 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09381/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Emotion Recognition in Speech using Cross-Modal Transfer in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05561/) (2018)
- [Diverse Neural Network Learns True Target Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03131/) (2016)
- [Efficient Facial Feature Learning with Wide Ensemble-based Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06338/) (2020)
- [CNN-based Facial Affect Analysis on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08775/) (2018)
- [Progressive Spatio-Temporal Bilinear Network with Monte Carlo Dropout for Landmark-based Facial Expression Recognition with Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04332/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [AffectNet+: A Database for Enhancing Facial Expression Recognition with Soft-Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22506/) (2024)
- [Global Multiple Extraction Network for Low-Resolution Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05938/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diversity of the features extracted by deep neural networks is important for enhancing the model generalization ability and accordingly its performance in different learning tasks. Facial expression recognition in the wild has attracted interest in recent years due to the challenges existing in this area for extracting discriminative and informative features from occluded images in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to diversify the features extracted by CNN layers of state-of-the-art facial expression recognition architectures for enhancing the model capacity in learning discriminative features. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we incorporate this mechanism in two state-of-the-art models to (i) diversify local/global features in an attention-based model and (ii) diversify features extracted by different learners in an ensemble-based model. Experimental results on three well-known facial expression recognition in-the-wild datasets, AffectNet, FER+, and RAF-DB, show the effectiveness of our method, achieving the state-of-the-art performance of 89.99% on RAF-DB, 89.34% on FER+ and the competitive accuracy of 60.02% on AffectNet dataset.