# Point-Supervised Facial Expression Spotting with Gaussian-Based Instance-Adaptive Intensity Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16952 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16952/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04503/) (2017)
- [BSN: Boundary Sensitive Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02964/) (2018)
- [GMMSeg: Gaussian Mixture based Generative Semantic Segmentation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02025/) (2022)
- [AutoLoc: Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08333/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Anchor Mechanisms for Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09837/) (2020)
- [SF-Net: Single-Frame Supervision for Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06845/) (2020)
- [Video-based Facial Micro-Expression Analysis: A Survey of Datasets, Features and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12728/) (2022)
- [Learning Action Completeness from Points for Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05029/) (2021)
- [Cross-modal Consensus Network for Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12589/) (2021)
- [SAMM Long Videos: A Spontaneous Facial Micro- and Macro-Expressions Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01519/) (2019)
- [Enhancing Zero-Shot Facial Expression Recognition by LLM Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19100/) (2024)
- [Feature Representation Learning with Adaptive Displacement Generation and Transformer Fusion for Micro-Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04420/) (2023)
- [3D-CNN for Facial Micro- and Macro-expression Spotting on Long Video Sequences using Temporal Oriented Reference Frame](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06340/) (2021)
- [Weakly-Supervised Text-driven Contrastive Learning for Facial Behavior Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00058/) (2023)
- [HR-Pro: Point-supervised Temporal Action Localization via Hierarchical Reliability Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12608/) (2023)
- [ExpLLM: Towards Chain of Thought for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02828/) (2024)
- [Shallow Optical Flow Three-Stream CNN for Macro- and Micro-Expression Spotting from Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06489/) (2021)
- [ProtoCon: Pseudo-label Refinement via Online Clustering and Prototypical Consistency for Efficient Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13556/) (2023)
- [AU-aware graph convolutional network for Macro- and Micro-expression spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09114/) (2023)
- [Facial emotion expressions in human-robot interaction: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07169/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Facial Expression Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15994/) (2024)
- [SpotFormer: Multi-Scale Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Facial Expression Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20799/) (2024)
- [Could Micro-Expressions be Quantified? Electromyography Gives Affirmative Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00017/) (2024)
- [Weak Supervision with Arbitrary Single Frame for Micro- and Macro-expression Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14240/) (2024)
- [FED-PsyAU: Privacy-Preserving Micro-Expression Recognition via Psychological AU Coordination and Dynamic Facial Motion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20557/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic facial expression spotting, which aims to identify facial expression instances in untrimmed videos, is crucial for facial expression analysis. Existing methods primarily focus on fully-supervised learning and rely on costly, time-consuming temporal boundary annotations. In this paper, we investigate point-supervised facial expression spotting (P-FES), where only a single timestamp annotation per instance is required for training. We propose a unique two-branch framework for P-FES. First, to mitigate the limitation of hard pseudo-labeling, which often confuses neutral and expression frames with various intensities, we propose a Gaussian-based instance-adaptive intensity modeling (GIM) module to model instance-level expression intensity distribution for soft pseudo-labeling. By detecting the pseudo-apex frame around each point label, estimating the duration, and constructing an instance-level Gaussian distribution, GIM assigns soft pseudo-labels to expression frames for more reliable intensity supervision. The GIM module is incorporated into our framework to optimize the class-agnostic expression intensity branch. Second, we design a class-aware apex classification branch that distinguishes macro- and micro-expressions solely based on their pseudo-apex frames. During inference, the two branches work independently: the class-agnostic expression intensity branch generates expression proposals, while the class-aware apex-classification branch is responsible for macro- and micro-expression classification. Furthermore, we introduce an intensity-aware contrastive loss to enhance discriminative feature learning and suppress neutral noise by contrasting neutral frames with expression frames with various intensities. Extensive experiments on the SAMM-LV, CAS(ME)2, and CAS(ME)3 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.