# Rethinking the Role of Feature Engineering and Learning Strategies in Few-Shot Hidden Emotion Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31249 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31249/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [Expanding Language-Image Pretrained Models for General Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02816/) (2022)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13586/) (2021)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [RTMPose: Real-Time Multi-Person Pose Estimation based on MMPose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07399/) (2023)
- [iMiGUE: An Identity-free Video Dataset for Micro-Gesture Understanding and Emotion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00285/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Micro-action Recognition: Dataset, Methods, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05234/) (2024)
- [Frequency Decoupling for Motion Magnification via Multi-Level Isomorphic Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07347/) (2024)
- [EulerMormer: Robust Eulerian Motion Magnification via Dynamic Filtering within Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04152/) (2023)
- [Joint Skeletal and Semantic Embedding Loss for Micro-gesture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10624/) (2023)
- [Prototypical Calibrating Ambiguous Samples for Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14719/) (2024)
- [MMAD: Multi-label Micro-Action Detection in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05311/) (2024)
- [Micro-gesture Online Recognition using Learnable Query Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04490/) (2024)
- [Prototype Learning for Micro-gesture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03097/) (2024)
- [Data Augmentation for Human Behavior Analysis in Multi-Person Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01526/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [MAC 2026: Advancing Micro-Action Analysis Towards Fine-Grained Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16284/) (2026)
- [Recognition-Conditioned Reasoning: A Training-Free Multimodal-LLM Pipeline for Fine-Grained Micro-Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21022/) (2026)
- [SoftRerank: Hierarchical Soft Fusion with Candidate-Label Reranking for Long-Tailed Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08221/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present the solution developed by our team, XInsight Lab, which achieved first place in Track 3 of the 4th EI-MIGA-IJCAI Challenge with a test accuracy of 0.76923. To address the challenge of weak and sparse implicit emotion evidence in long videos, this paper extends the winning solution from the previous competition and proposes a compact multi-modal temporal modeling framework. The framework integrates and evaluates the effects of multi-source features, including 2D/3D skeletons, facial expression Blendshapes, DINOv2/v3 vision foundation models, X-CLIP video features, and Gemini semantic priors. Architecturally, we propose a cross-attention mechanism that utilizes static pose features, denoted as Base, as the Query and dynamic micro-motion differential features, denoted as Offset, as the Key and Value. By capturing local relative velocities, this mechanism eliminates static biases related to individual body shape and identity. Concurrently, an adaptive pooling method based on Multiple Instance Learning is employed to extract instantaneous emotions while suppressing background noise in long sequences. Finally, the paper reveals the representation collapse phenomenon of general vision foundation models in micro-dynamic tasks, and analyzes the underlying mechanisms where networks fall into public-leaderboard-driven pseudo-generalization due to shortcut learning and rote memorization.