Face-Guided Sentiment Boundary Enhancement for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Sentiment Localization

Point-level weakly-supervised temporal sentiment localization (P-WTSL) aims to detect sentiment-relevant segments in untrimmed multimodal videos using timestamp sentiment annotations, which greatly reduces the costly frame-level labeling. To tackle the intrinsic challenges of imprecise sentiment boundaries in P-WTSL, we propose the Face-guided Sentiment Boundary Enhancement Network FSENet, a unified framework that leverages fine-grained facial features to guide sentiment localization. Specifically, our approach first introduces the Face-guided Sentiment Discovery (FSD) module, which integrates facial features into multimodal interaction via dual-branch modeling for effective sentiment stimuli clues; We then propose the Point-aware Sentiment Semantics Contrast (PSSC) strategy to discriminate sentiment semantics of candidate points (frame-level) near annotation points via contrastive learning, thereby enhancing the model's ability to recognize sentiment boundaries. At last, we design the Boundary-aware Sentiment Pseudo-label Generation (BSPG) approach to convert sparse point annotations into temporally smooth supervisory pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments and visualizations on the benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance under full supervision, video-level, and point-level weak supervision, thereby showcasing the strong generalization ability of our FSENet across different annotation settings. The code will be open source to the public.