AVF-MAE++: Scaling Affective Video Facial Masked Autoencoders via Efficient Audio-Visual Self-Supervised Learning

Abstract

Affective Video Facial Analysis (AVFA) is important for advancing emotion-aware AI, yet the persistent data scarcity in AVFA presents challenges. Recently, the self-supervised learning (SSL) technique of Masked Autoencoders (MAE) has gained significant attention, particularly in its audio-visual adaptation. Insights from general domains suggest that scaling is vital for unlocking impressive improvements, though its effects on AVFA remain largely unexplored. Additionally, capturing both intra- and inter-modal correlations through scalable representations is a crucial challenge in this field. To tackle these gaps, we introduce AVF-MAE++, a series audio-visual MAE designed to explore the impact of scaling on AVFA with a focus on advanced correlation modeling. Our method incorporates a novel audio-visual dual masking strategy and an improved modality encoder with a holistic view to better support scalable pre-training. Furthermore, we propose the Iteratively Audio-Visual Correlations Learning Module to improve correlations capture within the SSL framework, bridging the limitations of prior methods. To support smooth adaptation and mitigate overfitting, we also introduce a progressive semantics injection strategy, which structures training in three stages. Extensive experiments across 17 datasets, spanning three key AVFA tasks, demonstrate the superior performance of AVF-MAE++, establishing new state-of-the-art outcomes. Ablation studies provide further insights into the critical design choices driving these gains. Code is released at https://github.com/XuecWu/AVF-MAE.