# REACT 2026: The Fourth Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation Challenge: Personalised MAFRG and Appropriate EEG Reaction Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07935 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07935/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Learning to Listen: Modeling Non-Deterministic Dyadic Facial Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08451/) (2022)
- [FaceVerse: a Fine-grained and Detail-controllable 3D Face Morphable Model from a Hybrid Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14057/) (2022)
- [Learning Multi-dimensional Edge Feature-based AU Relation Graph for Facial Action Unit Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01782/) (2022)
- [Responsive Listening Head Generation: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13548/) (2021)
- [The GENEA Challenge 2022: A large evaluation of data-driven co-speech gesture generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10441/) (2022)
- [Dyadic Interaction Modeling for Social Behavior Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09069/) (2024)
- [ReactFace: Online Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation in Dyadic Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15748/) (2023)
- [Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation in Dyadic Interaction Settings: What, Why and How?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06514/) (2023)
- [REACT 2024: the Second Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05166/) (2024)
- [Reversible Graph Neural Network-based Reaction Distribution Learning for Multiple Appropriate Facial Reactions Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15270/) (2023)
- [REACT 2025: the Third Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17223/) (2025)
- [Robust Facial Reactions Generation: An Emotion-Aware Framework with Modality Compensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15798/) (2024)
- [Latent Behavior Diffusion for Sequential Reaction Generation in Dyadic Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07901/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In dyadic interactions, various human facial reactions could be appropriate for responding to each human speaker behaviour. Following the successful organisation of the REACT 2023, 2024 and 2025 challenge series, a body of generative deep learning (DL) models have been developed for the problem of multiple appropriate facial reaction generation (MAFRG). This year, we propose the REACT 2026 challenge encouraging the development and benchmarking of Machine Learning (ML) models that can generate multiple personalised, appropriate, diverse, realistic and synchronised human-style facial reactions expressed by a specific human listener for responding to each given speaker behaviour. As a key of the challenge, we continuously provide challenge participants with MARS dataset introduced by REACT 2025 but additionally provide individual-level Big-Five personality labels and EEG recordings. This introduces a new one-to-many personalised facial reaction generation setting combining human expressive behavioural, affective and neurophysiological signals, which remains largely unexplored in current dyadic interaction modelling. This paper also presents the challenge guidelines and new baselines on the four proposed sub-challenges: Offline generic and personalised MAFRG as well as Online generic and personalised MAFRG, respectively, which are publicly available at https://github.com/reactmultimodalchallenge/baseline_react2026.