# Enhancing Ambiguous Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition with Soft Label-based Data Augmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20867 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20867/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [On Mixup Training: Improved Calibration and Predictive Uncertainty for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11001/) (2019)
- [Puzzle Mix: Exploiting Saliency and Local Statistics for Optimal Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06962/) (2020)
- [Suppressing Uncertainties for Large-Scale Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10392/) (2020)
- [SaliencyMix: A Saliency Guided Data Augmentation Strategy for Better Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01791/) (2020)
- [PixMix: Dreamlike Pictures Comprehensively Improve Safety Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05135/) (2021)
- [DFEW: A Large-Scale Database for Recognizing Dynamic Facial Expressions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05924/) (2020)
- [Co-Mixup: Saliency Guided Joint Mixup with Supermodular Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03065/) (2021)
- [AugMax: Adversarial Composition of Random Augmentations for Robust Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13771/) (2021)
- [Dive into Ambiguity: Latent Distribution Mining and Pairwise Uncertainty Estimation for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00232/) (2021)
- [TransMix: Attend to Mix for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09833/) (2021)
- [DiffuseMix: Label-Preserving Data Augmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14881/) (2024)
- [ResizeMix: Mixing Data with Preserved Object Information and True Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11101/) (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)
- [MixGen: A New Multi-Modal Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08358/) (2022)
- [Frame attention networks for facial expression recognition in videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00193/) (2019)
- [Contrast and Mix: Temporal Contrastive Video Domain Adaptation with Background Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15128/) (2021)
- [TokenMix: Rethinking Image Mixing for Data Augmentation in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08409/) (2022)
- [MAE-DFER: Efficient Masked Autoencoder for Self-supervised Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02227/) (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)
- [MixMo: Mixing Multiple Inputs for Multiple Outputs via Deep Subnetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06132/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Mix-based Data Augmentation: Taxonomy, Methods, Applications, and Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10888/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Revisiting Emotions Representation for Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06778/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER) is a task that estimates emotions from facial expression video sequences. For practical applications, accurately recognizing ambiguous facial expressions -- frequently encountered in in-the-wild data -- is essential. In this study, we propose MIDAS, a data augmentation method designed to enhance DFER performance for ambiguous facial expression data using soft labels representing probabilities of multiple emotion classes. MIDAS augments training data by convexly combining pairs of video frames and their corresponding emotion class labels. This approach extends mixup to soft-labeled video data, offering a simple yet highly effective method for handling ambiguity in DFER. To evaluate MIDAS, we conducted experiments on both the DFEW dataset and FERV39k-Plus, a newly constructed dataset that assigns soft labels to an existing DFER dataset. The results demonstrate that models trained with MIDAS-augmented data achieve superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art method trained on the original dataset.