Trimodal Context-Aware Micro-Expression Recognition in Real-World Conversations: A Dataset and a Hierarchical Fusion Network

Paper · https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23930

arXiv:2610.23930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recognizing micro-expressions in real-world conversations is challenging, as these facial movements are brief and faint, and their interpretations are strongly dependent on the contextual circumstances of their occurrence. Most existing methods are de-contextualized, as they analyze isolated video clips while disregarding the semantic and acoustic cues in the surrounding dialogue that help explain the emergence of an expression. Decades of psychological studies have shown that social context exerts influences on facial behavior over two key dimensions: how an expression is interpreted and how strongly it is generated to begin with. However, existing micro-expression research rarely incorporates such contextual factors into its models. As an example, provocative utterances from an interlocutor may elicit suppressed negative affective reactions, which isolated silent clips are unable to account for. We propose TriCoME, a trimodal dataset consisting of visual, audio and text data sourced from real-world conversations. In this dataset, each micro-expression is paired with its concurrent utterance and preceding context. We further annotate the context based on conversational role to denote two categories: external stimuli from an interlocutor's utterance and internal background from the subject's own utterance. On this basis, we propose the Hierarchical Focusing Fusion Network (HFFNet), which aligns acoustic and semantic streams at fine granularity, compresses long dialogue sequences, modulates attention toward conversational roles via a context-type embedding, and routes each sample between visual-only and multimodal decisions based on visual confidence to prevent noisy context from degrading recognition performance.

First seen by Oriel on Oct 20, 2026, 05:50 UTC.