Knowing You at First Glance: Inferring Apparent Personality from Faces

2026-07-16

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of inferring first-impression personality traits—such as MBTI types—from static facial images alone, without relying on linguistic or behavioral cues. To this end, the authors propose GlanceFace, an end-to-end framework that innovatively integrates vision-language models to inject semantic priors into facial representation learning. A key component is a semantics-enhanced facial representation module designed to capture subtle, personality-relevant visual cues. Furthermore, an uncertainty-aware learning strategy is employed to mitigate the impact of subjective and noisy annotations inherent in perceptual labeling. Experimental results demonstrate that GlanceFace significantly outperforms existing methods on MBTI benchmark tasks, achieving high-accuracy personality inference from a single facial image for the first time. These findings reveal a profound link between facial appearance and perceived personality, offering interpretable initial interaction strategies for embodied intelligent agents.

Abstract

Inferring apparent personality from facial images is important in social scenarios for embodied agents in human-robot interaction. Unlike inferring intrinsic personality traits via conversation, this task models first-impression personality perception based solely on facial appearance before interaction begins. Existing studies mainly focus on the Big Five personality model and often rely on language or multimodal inputs. As a result, it remains unclear whether facial cues alone can support meaningful associations with perceived personality traits. This question is particularly relevant for MBTI types, which are widely used in practice and more readily interpretable by large language models. To this end, we propose \textbf{GlanceFace}, an end-to-end framework for apparent personality inference leveraging vision-language models to introduce semantic priors and a semantic-enhanced facial representation module to capture subtle personality-related cues, together with an uncertainty-aware learning strategy to handle noisy and subjective annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong performance on MBTI-based apparent personality benchmarks and reveal relationships between facial characteristics and perceived personality traits, highlighting its potential to support adaptive initial interaction strategies for embodied agents. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/MrHuan3/GlanceFace.

Problem

• apparent personality
• facial appearance
• first impression
• MBTI
• personality inference

Innovation

• apparent personality
• MBTI
• vision-language model
• semantic-enhanced representation
• uncertainty-aware learning