# MPT: Motion Prompt Tuning for Micro-Expression Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09446 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09446/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08534/) (2022)
- [VL-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06825/) (2021)
- [ST-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Image-to-Video Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13559/) (2022)
- [AIM: Adapting Image Models for Efficient Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03024/) (2023)
- [Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10826/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Detection Transfer Learning with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11429/) (2021)
- [Dual Modality Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Pre-Trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08340/) (2022)
- [OFF-ApexNet on Micro-expression Recognition System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08699/) (2018)
- [Micron-BERT: BERT-based Facial Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03195/) (2023)
- [ProposalCLIP: Unsupervised Open-Category Object Proposal Generation via Exploiting CLIP Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06696/) (2022)
- [Feature refinement: An expression-specific feature learning and fusion method for micro-expression recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04838/) (2021)
- [LEARNet Dynamic Imaging Network for Micro Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09410/) (2019)
- [Short and Long Range Relation Based Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05851/) (2021)
- [Transformer Scale Gate for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07056/) (2022)
- [Feature Representation Learning with Adaptive Displacement Generation and Transformer Fusion for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04420/) (2023)
- [Learning to Rank Onset-Occurring-Offset Representations for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04664/) (2023)
- [Spatio-temporal Prompting Network for Robust Video Feature Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02574/) (2024)
- [Seeking Salient Facial Regions for Cross-Database Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15361/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Micro-expression recognition (MER) is crucial in the affective computing field due to its wide application in medical diagnosis, lie detection, and criminal investigation. Despite its significance, obtaining micro-expression (ME) annotations is challenging due to the expertise required from psychological professionals. Consequently, ME datasets often suffer from a scarcity of training samples, severely constraining the learning of MER models. While current large pre-training models (LMs) offer general and discriminative representations, their direct application to MER is hindered by an inability to capture transitory and subtle facial movements-essential elements for effective MER. This paper introduces Motion Prompt Tuning (MPT) as a novel approach to adapting LMs for MER, representing a pioneering method for subtle motion prompt tuning. Particularly, we introduce motion prompt generation, including motion magnification and Gaussian tokenization, to extract subtle motions as prompts for LMs. Additionally, a group adapter is carefully designed and inserted into the LM to enhance it in the target MER domain, facilitating a more nuanced distinction of ME representation. Furthermore, extensive experiments conducted on three widely used MER datasets demonstrate that our proposed MPT consistently surpasses state-of-the-art approaches and verifies its effectiveness.