Facial-Expression-Aware Prompting for Empathetic LLM Tutoring
Shuangquan Feng,
Laura Fleig,
Ruisen Tu,
Philip Chi,
Edmund Bu,
Melinda Ozel,
Junhua Ma,
Teng Fei,
Virginia R. de Sa
ACII
2026
Facial expressions provide immediate and practical cues of confusion, frustration,
or engagement but remain underexplored in LLM-driven tutoring.
We demonstrated that facial-expression-aware signals can improve empathetic
tutoring responses through prompt-level integration without end-to-end retraining.