C. Chen

Chenglizhao Chen, Boze Li, Mengke Song et al.

Depression is a severe global mental health issue that impairs daily functioning and overall quality of life. Although recent audio-visual approaches have improved automatic depression detection, methods that ignore emotional cues often fail to capture subtle depressive signals hidden within emotional expressions. Conversely, those incorporating emotions frequently confuse transient emotional expressions with stable depressive symptoms in feature representations, a phenomenon termed \emph{Emotional Ambiguity}, thereby leading to detection errors. To address this critical issue, we propose READ-Net, the first audio-visual depression detection framework explicitly designed to resolve Emotional Ambiguity through Adaptive Feature Recalibration (AFR). The core insight of AFR is to dynamically adjust the weights of emotional features to enhance depression-related signals. Rather than merely overlooking or naively combining emotional information, READ-Net innovatively identifies and preserves depressive-relevant cues within emotional features, while adaptively filtering out irrelevant emotional noise. This recalibration strategy significantly clarifies feature representations, and effectively mitigates the persistent challenge of emotional interference. Additionally, READ-Net can be easily integrated into existing frameworks for improved performance. Extensive evaluations on three publicly available datasets show that READ-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with average gains of 4.55\% in accuracy and 1.26\% in F1-score, demonstrating its robustness to emotional disturbances and improving audio-visual depression detection.

Chenglizhao Chen, Shujian Zhang, Luming Li et al.

Existing \textbf{s}alient \textbf{o}bject \textbf{d}etection (SOD) methods adopt a \textbf{passive} visual stimulus-based rationale--objects with the strongest visual stimuli are perceived as the user's primary focus (i.e., salient objects). They ignore the decisive role of users' \textbf{proactive needs} in segmenting salient objects--if a user has a need before seeing an image, the user's salient objects align with their needs, e.g., if a user's need is ``white apple'', when this user sees an image, the user's primary focus is on the ``white apple'' or ``the most white apple-like'' objects in the image. Such an oversight not only \textbf{fails to satisfy users}, but also \textbf{limits the development of downstream tasks}. For instance, in salient object ranking tasks, focusing solely on visual stimuli-based salient objects is insufficient for conducting an analysis of fine-grained relationships between users' viewing order (usually determined by user's needs) and scenes, which may result in wrong ranking results. Clearly, it is essential to detect salient objects based on user needs. Thus, we advocate a \textbf{User} \textbf{S}alient \textbf{O}bject \textbf{D}etection (UserSOD) task, which focuses on \textbf{detecting salient objects align with users' proactive needs when user have needs}. The main challenge for this new task is the lack of datasets for model training and testing.

Diqiong Jiang, Kai Zhu, Dan Song et al.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims to generate realistic and expressive facial motions directly from audio. While recent methods achieve high-quality lip synchronization, they often rely on discrete emotion categories, limiting continuous and fine-grained emotional control. We present EditEmoTalk, a controllable speech-driven 3D facial animation framework with continuous emotion editing. The key idea is a boundary-aware semantic embedding that learns the normal directions of inter-emotion decision boundaries, enabling a continuous expression manifold for smooth emotion manipulation. Moreover, we introduce an emotional consistency loss that enforces semantic alignment between the generated motion dynamics and the target emotion embedding through a mapping network, ensuring faithful emotional expression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EditEmoTalk achieves superior controllability, expressiveness, and generalization while maintaining accurate lip synchronization. Code and pretrained models will be released.