# Chehre: An Emoji-Prompted Dataset to Explore Perceptual Flexibility in Video Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21657 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21657/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

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- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [AffectNet: A Database for Facial Expression, Valence, and Arousal Computing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03985/) (2017)
- [VLMEvalKit: An Open-Source Toolkit for Evaluating Large Multi-Modality Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11691/) (2024)
- [Reliable Fidelity and Diversity Metrics for Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09797/) (2020)
- [Dealing with Disagreements: Looking Beyond the Majority Vote in Subjective Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05719/) (2021)
- [LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03168/) (2024)
- [UniMax: Fairer and more Effective Language Sampling for Large-Scale Multilingual Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09151/) (2023)
- [The 'Problem' of Human Label Variation: On Ground Truth in Data, Modeling and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02570/) (2022)
- [DFEW: A Large-Scale Database for Recognizing Dynamic Facial Expressions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05924/) (2020)
- [Label Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.6027/) (2014)
- [Emotion-LLaMA: Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Reasoning with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11161/) (2024)
- [Context-Aware Emotion Recognition Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05913/) (2019)
- [BeLFusion: Latent Diffusion for Behavior-Driven Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14304/) (2022)
- [Aff-Wild2: Extending the Aff-Wild Database for Affect Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07770/) (2018)
- [EmoBench: Evaluating the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12071/) (2024)
- [The Prompt Makes the Person(a): A Systematic Evaluation of Sociodemographic Persona Prompting for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16076/) (2025)
- [GPT-4V with Emotion: A Zero-shot Benchmark for Generalized Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04293/) (2023)
- [Personas with Attitudes: Controlling LLMs for Diverse Data Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11745/) (2024)
- [MME-Emotion: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Emotional Intelligence in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09210/) (2025)
- [VEATIC: Video-based Emotion and Affect Tracking in Context Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06745/) (2023)
- [Contextual Emotion Recognition using Large Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08992/) (2024)
- [VIBE: Can a VLM Read the Room?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11162/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Do people perceive the same facial expression in the same way? Should we expect vision models to be flexible in how they perceive facial expressions? Facial expressions are nonverbal social signals used in human interaction, but facial expression recognition datasets often focus on a single deterministic annotation per sample. We introduce Chehre, an emoji-prompted video dataset with a wide range of dynamic facial expressions for exploring perceptual variation. In Chehre, 203 participants were prompted to express and record 40 facial emojis. Later, their facial motions were transferred onto synthetic faces to preserve privacy. A separate group annotated the videos, resulting in 2,111 videos annotated by 1,242 perceivers, with ~30 annotators per video. Chehre enables us to define a new task: "distributional expression recognition", which tests whether a model can reproduce the variation observed across annotator responses. We test a selection of video language models on our task. Interestingly, we find that persona prompting can act as a controllable way to shift model perception while helping models better capture the variation observed across human annotators. The dataset and code are available at https://chehre-dataset.github.io/.