# Learning with Alignments: Tackling the Inter- and Intra-domain Shifts for Cross-multidomain Facial Expression Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05688 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05688/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [AffectNet: A Database for Facial Expression, Valence, and Arousal Computing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03985/) (2017)
- [A Survey of Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02849/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Domain Adaptive Ensemble Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07325/) (2020)
- [Asymmetric Tri-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08400/) (2017)
- [Deep Subdomain Adaptation Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09388/) (2021)
- [Deep Cocktail Network: Multi-source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Category Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00830/) (2018)
- [Cross-Domain Facial Expression Recognition: A Unified Evaluation Benchmark and Adversarial Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00923/) (2020)
- [Aligning Domain-specific Distribution and Classifier for Cross-domain Classification from Multiple Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01003/) (2022)
- [T-SVDNet: Exploring High-Order Prototypical Correlations for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14447/) (2021)
- [Improving Cross-Corpus Speech Emotion Recognition with Adversarial Discriminative Domain Generalization (ADDoG)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12094/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Graph Representation Adaptation for Cross-Domain Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00859/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [BTMuda: A Bi-level Multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation framework for breast cancer diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17054/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Hardness-driven Augmentation and Alignment Strategies for Multi-Source Domain Adaptations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01142/) (2025)
- [AUCH-Net: Action Unit-Based Consistency-Aware Hypergraph Network for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21004/) (2026)
- [Domain-Division based Progressive Learning for Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29202/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) holds significant importance in human-computer interactions. Existing cross-domain FER methods often transfer knowledge solely from a single labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, neglecting the comprehensive information across multiple sources. Nevertheless, cross-multidomain FER (CMFER) is very challenging for (i) the inherent inter-domain shifts across multiple domains and (ii) the intra-domain shifts stemming from the ambiguous expressions and low inter-class distinctions. In this paper, we propose a novel Learning with Alignments CMFER framework, named LA-CMFER, to handle both inter- and intra-domain shifts. Specifically, LA-CMFER is constructed with a global branch and a local branch to extract features from the full images and local subtle expressions, respectively. Based on this, LA-CMFER presents a dual-level inter-domain alignment method to force the model to prioritize hard-to-align samples in knowledge transfer at a sample level while gradually generating a well-clustered feature space with the guidance of class attributes at a cluster level, thus narrowing the inter-domain shifts. To address the intra-domain shifts, LA-CMFER introduces a multi-view intra-domain alignment method with a multi-view clustering consistency constraint where a prediction similarity matrix is built to pursue consistency between the global and local views, thus refining pseudo labels and eliminating latent noise. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets have validated the superiority of our LA-CMFER.