Feature Aggregation for Efficient Continual Learning of Complex Facial Expressions
To address catastrophic forgetting in continual learning for facial expression recognition (FER), this paper proposes a progressive continual learning framework tailored for multicultural dynamic affective interaction. Methodologically, it introduces the first dual-modality representation integrating deep convolutional features with Facial Action Coding System (FACS) action units (AUs), and designs a lightweight Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Model (BGMM) enabling online probabilistic inference without retraining. Experiments on the CFEE dataset demonstrate significant improvements: composite expression recognition accuracy increases notably, knowledge retention improves by 23.6%, and forgetting rate decreases by 41.2%. This work is the first to incorporate AU priors into continual FER modeling, yielding an efficient, scalable, and low-forgetting affective intelligence system. It advances cross-cultural, fine-grained affective understanding with strong practical implications.