mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Focal-RegionFace: Generating Fine-Grained Multi-attribute Descriptions for Arbitrarily Selected Face Focal Regions

arXiv 2601.00156 ↗First posted 1 Jan 2026cs.CVcited by 1

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Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we introduce an underexplored problem in facial analysis: generating and recognizing multi-attribute natural language descriptions, containing facial action units (AUs), emotional states, and age estimation, for arbitrarily selected face regions (termed FaceFocalDesc). We argue that the system's ability to focus on individual facial areas leads to better understanding and control. To achieve this capability, we construct a new multi-attribute description dataset for arbitrarily selected face regions, providing rich region-level annotations and natural language descriptions. Further, we propose a fine-tuned vision-language model based on Qwen2.5-VL, called Focal-RegionFace for facial state analysis, which incrementally refines its focus on localized facial features through multiple progressively fine-tuning stages, resulting in interpretable age estimation, FAU and emotion detection. Experimental results show that Focal-RegionFace achieves the best performance on the new benchmark in terms of traditional and widely used metrics, as well as new proposed metrics. This fully verifies its effectiveness and versatility in fine-grained multi-attribute face region-focal analysis scenarios.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 25 of its 54 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Jan 2026.

Builds on

25 of 54 references.

References · 25

  1. 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,462
  2. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  3. 2025Gemma 3 Technical Reportcited by 1,686
  4. 2024LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Modelscited by 1,442
  5. 2025Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scalingcited by 787
  6. 2024LLM Evaluators Recognize and Favor Their Own Generationscited by 651
  7. 2017AffectNet: A Database for Facial Expression, Valence, and Arousal Computing in the Wildcited by 490
  8. 2017Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencodercited by 426
  9. 2024Emotion-LLaMA: Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Reasoning with Instruction Tuningcited by 117
  10. 2023ABAW: Valence-Arousal Estimation, Expression Recognition, Action Unit Detection & Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation Challengescited by 110
  11. 2023Masked Contrastive Graph Representation Learning for Age Estimationcited by 27
  12. 2024IISAN: Efficiently Adapting Multimodal Representation for Sequential Recommendation with Decoupled PEFTcited by 26
13 more
  1. 2025FaceXBench: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs on Face Understandingcited by 23
  2. 2024FSFM: A Generalizable Face Security Foundation Model via Self-Supervised Facial Representation Learningcited by 21
  3. 2023LA-Net: Landmark-Aware Learning for Reliable Facial Expression Recognition under Label Noisecited by 17
  4. 2020RAF-AU Database: In-the-Wild Facial Expressions with Subjective Emotion Judgement and Objective AU Annotationscited by 11
  5. 2025FaceBench: A Multi-View Multi-Level Facial Attribute VQA Dataset for Benchmarking Face Perception MLLMscited by 11
  6. 2023Toward High Quality Facial Representation Learningcited by 10
  7. 2025Efficient LLaMA-3.2-Vision by Trimming Cross-attended Visual Featurescited by 10
  8. 2024Towards End-to-End Explainable Facial Action Unit Recognition via Vision-Language Joint Learningcited by 9
  9. 2025Face-LLaVA: Facial Expression and Attribute Understanding through Instruction Tuningcited by 9
  10. 2017Multi-View Dynamic Facial Action Unit Detectioncited by 7
  11. 2024Efficient and Effective Adaptation of Multimodal Foundation Models in Sequential Recommendationcited by 7
  12. 2024Generalizable Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 6
  13. 2025Multimodal Representation Learning Techniques for Comprehensive Facial State Analysiscited by 2

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  1. 2026Out of the box age estimation through facial imagery: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Vision-Language Models vs. out-of-the-box Traditional Architectures
  2. 2024Exploring Vision Language Models for Facial Attribute Recognition: Emotion, Race, Gender, and Age
  3. 2025FaceInsight: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Face Perception
  4. 2025FaceLLM: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Face Understanding
  5. 2025Rethinking Facial Expression Recognition in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models: Benchmark, Datasets, and Beyond
  6. 2025Facial Dynamics in Video: Instruction Tuning for Improved Facial Expression Perception and Contextual Awareness
  7. 2026MAUGen: A Unified Diffusion Approach for Multi-Identity Facial Expression and AU Label Generation
  8. 2026MTVDiff: Multimodal Conditional Latent Diffusion for Enhanced Thermal-to-Visible Face Translation