Scalable Audio-Visual Masked Autoencoders for Efficient Affective Video Facial Analysis

Abstract: Affective video facial analysis (AVFA) has emerged as a key research field for building emotion-aware intelligent systems, yet this field continues to suffer from limited data availability. In recent years, the self-supervised learning (SSL) technique of Masked Autoencoders (MAE) has gained momentum, with growing adaptations in its audio-visual contexts. While scaling has proven essential for breakthroughs in general multi-modal learning domains, its specific impact on AVFA remains largely unexplored. Another core challenge in this field is capturing both intra- and inter-modal correlations through scalable audio-visual representations. To tackle these issues, we propose AVF-MAE++, a family of audio-visual MAE models designed to efficiently investigate the scaling properties in AVFA while enhancing cross-modal correlation modeling. Our framework introduces a novel dual masking strategy across audio and visual modalities and strengthens modality encoders with a more holistic design to better support scalable pre-training. Additionally, we present the Iterative Audio-Visual Correlation Learning Module, which improves correlation learning within the SSL paradigm, bridging the limitations of previous methods. To support smooth adaptation and reduce overfitting risks, we further introduce a progressive semantic injection strategy, organizing the model training into three structured stages. Extensive experiments conducted on 17 datasets, covering three major AVFA tasks, demonstrate that AVF-MAE++ achieves consistent state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks. Comprehensive ablation studies further highlight the importance of each proposed component and provide deeper insights into the design choices driving these improvements. Our code and models have been publicly released at Github.