# GLaRE: A Graph-based Landmark Region Embedding Network for Emotion Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20579 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20579/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [AffectNet: A Database for Facial Expression, Valence, and Arousal Computing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03985/) (2017)
- [Spatial-Temporal Recurrent Neural Network for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04515/) (2017)
- [Occlusion-Adaptive Deep Network for Robust Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06040/) (2020)
- [FunQG: Molecular Representation Learning Via Quotient Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08597/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Facial expression recognition (FER) is a crucial task in computer vision with wide range of applications including human computer interaction, surveillance, and assistive technologies. However, challenges such as occlusion, expression variability, and lack of interpretability hinder the performance of traditional FER systems. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) offer a powerful alternative by modeling relational dependencies between facial landmarks, enabling structured and interpretable learning. In this paper, we propose GLaRE, a novel Graph-based Landmark Region Embedding network for emotion recognition. Facial landmarks are extracted using 3D facial alignment, and a quotient graph is constructed via hierarchical coarsening to preserve spatial structure while reducing complexity. Our method achieves 64.89 percentage accuracy on AffectNet and 94.24 percentage on FERG, outperforming several existing baselines. Additionally, ablation studies have demonstrated that region-level embeddings from quotient graphs have contributed to improved prediction performance.