English

Facial Expression Generation Aligned with Human Preference for Natural Dyadic Interaction

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-10 v1

Abstract

Achieving natural dyadic interaction requires generating facial expressions that are emotionally appropriate and socially aligned with human preference. Human feedback offers a compelling mechanism to guide such alignment, yet how to effectively incorporate this feedback into facial expression generation remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a facial expression generation method aligned with human preference by leveraging human feedback to produce contextually and emotionally appropriate expressions for natural dyadic interaction. A key to our method is framing the generation of identity-independent facial expressions as an action learning process, allowing human feedback to assess their validity free from visual or identity bias. We establish a closed feedback loop in which listener expressions dynamically respond to evolving conversational cues of the speaker. Concretely, we train a vision-language-action model via supervised fine-tuning to map the speaker's multimodal signals into controllable low-dimensional expression representations of a 3D morphable model. We further introduce a human-feedback reinforcement learning strategy that integrates the imitation of high-quality expression response with critic-guided optimization. Experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that our method effectively aligns facial expressions with human preference and achieves superior performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.07093,
  title  = {Facial Expression Generation Aligned with Human Preference for Natural Dyadic Interaction},
  author = {Xu Chen and Rui Gao and Xinjie Zhang and Haoyu Zhang and Che Sun and Zhi Gao and Yuwei Wu and Yunde Jia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.07093},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:08:20.127Z