# A Visual Self-attention Mechanism Facial Expression Recognition Network beyond Convnext

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09077 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09077/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [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)
- [Dive into Ambiguity: Latent Distribution Mining and Pairwise Uncertainty Estimation for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00232/) (2021)
- [Learn From All: Erasing Attention Consistency for Noisy Label Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10299/) (2022)
- [Facial Expression Recognition with Visual Transformers and Attentional Selective Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16854/) (2021)
- [POSTER: A Pyramid Cross-Fusion Transformer Network for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04083/) (2022)
- [Vision Transformer with Attentive Pooling for Robust Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05463/) (2022)
- [Towards Semi-Supervised Deep Facial Expression Recognition with An Adaptive Confidence Margin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12341/) (2022)
- [Learning Emotion Representations from Verbal and Nonverbal Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13500/) (2023)
- [LA-Net: Landmark-Aware Learning for Reliable Facial Expression Recognition under Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09023/) (2023)
- [Leave No Stone Unturned: Mine Extra Knowledge for Imbalanced Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19636/) (2023)
- [Weakly-Supervised Text-driven Contrastive Learning for Facial Behavior Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00058/) (2023)
- [PAtt-Lite: Lightweight Patch and Attention MobileNet for Challenging Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09626/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Facial expression recognition is an important research direction in the field of artificial intelligence. Although new breakthroughs have been made in recent years, the uneven distribution of datasets and the similarity between different categories of facial expressions, as well as the differences within the same category among different subjects, remain challenges. This paper proposes a visual facial expression signal feature processing network based on truncated ConvNeXt approach(Conv-cut), to improve the accuracy of FER under challenging conditions. The network uses a truncated ConvNeXt-Base as the feature extractor, and then we designed a Detail Extraction Block to extract detailed features, and introduced a Self-Attention mechanism to enable the network to learn the extracted features more effectively. To evaluate the proposed Conv-cut approach, we conducted experiments on the RAF-DB and FERPlus datasets, and the results show that our model has achieved state-of-the-art performance. Our code could be accessed at Github.