Variational Encoder--Multi-Decoder (VE-MD) for Privacy-by-functional-design (Group) Emotion Recognition

ArXi:2604.02397v1 Announce Type: cross Group Emotion Recognition (GER) aims to infer collective affect in social environments such as classrooms, crowds, and public events. Many existing approaches rely on explicit individual-level processing, including cropped faces, person tracking, or per-person feature extraction, which makes the analysis pipeline person-centric and raises privacy concerns in deployment scenarios where only group-level understanding is needed.