# PE-CLIP: A Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Vision Language Models for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16945 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16945/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 30 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/prompt-learning-and-adaptation-of-clip/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Towards a Unified View of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04366/) (2021)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [DFEW: A Large-Scale Database for Recognizing Dynamic Facial Expressions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05924/) (2020)
- [FERV39k: A Large-Scale Multi-Scene Dataset for Facial Expression Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09463/) (2022)
- [MAFW: A Large-scale, Multi-modal, Compound Affective Database for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00847/) (2022)
- [VMT-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Multi-Task Dense Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08733/) (2023)
- [MARLIN: Masked Autoencoder for facial video Representation LearnINg](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06627/) (2022)
- [Prompting Visual-Language Models for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13382/) (2023)
- [MAE-DFER: Efficient Masked Autoencoder for Self-supervised Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02227/) (2023)
- [CLIPSyntel: CLIP and LLM Synergy for Multimodal Question Summarization in Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11541/) (2023)
- [Intensity-Aware Loss for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10335/) (2022)
- [From Static to Dynamic: Adapting Landmark-Aware Image Models for Facial Expression Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05447/) (2023)
- [Expression Snippet Transformer for Robust Video-based Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08409/) (2021)
- [FineCLIPER: Multi-modal Fine-grained CLIP for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition with AdaptERs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02157/) (2024)
- [Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04749/) (2022)
- [Weakly-Supervised Text-driven Contrastive Learning for Facial Behavior Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00058/) (2023)
- [FE-Adapter: Adapting Image-based Emotion Classifiers to Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02421/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Why Do Vision Language Models Struggle To Recognize Human Emotions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15280/) (2026)
- [Bidirectional Learning of Facial Action Units and Expressions via Structured Semantic Mapping across Heterogeneous Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10541/) (2026)
- [FIDA: Feature Instability-Driven Attack on Self-Supervised Facial Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26861/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP offer promising solutions for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition (DFER) but face challenges such as inefficient full fine-tuning, high complexity, and poor alignment between textual and visual representations. Additionally, existing methods struggle with ineffective temporal modeling. To address these issues, we propose PE-CLIP, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) framework that adapts CLIP for DFER while significantly reducing trainable parameters while maintaining high accuracy. PE-CLIP introduces two specialized adapters: a Temporal Dynamic Adapter (TDA) and a Shared Adapter (ShA). The TDA is a GRU-based module with dynamic scaling that captures sequential dependencies while emphasizing informative temporal features and suppressing irrelevant variations. The ShA is a lightweight adapter that refines representations within both textual and visual encoders, ensuring consistency and efficiency. Additionally, we integrate Multi-modal Prompt Learning (MaPLe), introducing learnable prompts for visual and action unit-based textual inputs, enhancing semantic alignment between modalities and enabling efficient CLIP adaptation for dynamic tasks. We evaluate PE-CLIP on two benchmark datasets, DFEW and FERV39K, achieving competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods while requiring fewer trainable parameters. By balancing efficiency and accuracy, PE-CLIP sets a new benchmark in resource-efficient DFER. The source code of the proposed PE-CLIP will be publicly available at https://github.com/Ibtissam-SAADI/PE-CLIP .