Thibault Geoffroy

Nadaud Edouard, Geoffroy Thibault, Khelifi Tesnim et al.

In this study, we investigate the combination of indicators, including performance, behavioral engagement, and emotional engagement, to identify students experiencing difficulties. We analyzed data from two primary sources: digital traces extracted from th e Learning Management System (LMS) and images captured by students' webcams. The digital traces provided insights into students' interactions with the educational content, while the images were utilized to analyze their emotional expressions during learnin g activities. By utilizing real data collected from students at a French engineering school, recorded during the 2022 2023 academic year, we observed a correlation between positive emotional states and improved academic outcomes. These preliminary findings support the notion that emotions play a crucial role in differentiating between high achieving and low achieving students.

Thibault Geoffroy, Myriam Maumy, Lionel Prevost

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly embedded in our daily life, the ability to recognize and adapt to human emotions is essential for effective human-computer interaction. Facial expression recognition (FER) provides a primary channel for inferring affective states, but the dynamic and culturally nuanced nature of emotions requires models that can learn continuously without forgetting prior knowledge. In this work, we propose a hybrid framework for FER in a continual learning setting that mitigates catastrophic forgetting. Our approach integrates two complementary modalities: deep convolutional features and facial Action Units (AUs) derived from the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). The combined representation is modelled through Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Models (BGMMs), which provide a lightweight, probabilistic solution that avoids retraining while offering strong discriminative power. Using the Compound Facial Expression of Emotion (CFEE) dataset, we show that our model can first learn basic expressions and then progressively recognize compound expressions. Experiments demonstrate improved accuracy, stronger knowledge retention, and reduced forgetting. This framework contributes to the development of emotionally intelligent AI systems with applications in education, healthcare, and adaptive user interfaces.

Thibault Geoffroy, Gauthier Gerspacher, Lionel Prevost

Incremental learning is a complex process due to potential catastrophic forgetting of old tasks when learning new ones. This is mainly due to transient features that do not fit from task to task. In this paper, we focus on complex emotion recognition. First, we learn basic emotions and then, incrementally, like humans, complex emotions. We show that Action Units, describing facial muscle movements, are non-transient, highly semantical features that outperform those extracted by both shallow and deep convolutional neural networks. Thanks to this ability, our approach achieves interesting results when learning incrementally complex, compound emotions with an accuracy of 0.75 on the CFEE dataset and can be favorably compared to state-of-the-art results. Moreover, it results in a lightweight model with a small memory footprint.