Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Faculty Publications Article Faculty Publications -Articles Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource S, Akshay; S R, Jnana Sai; B R, Sinchana; M, Kannan; Mukhopadhyay, Adwitiya Title A name given to the resource Actor-critic guided CDBN with GAN augmentation for robust facial emotion recognition Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01-01-2026 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived MethodsX;Volume;16;Issue;;Article No.;103774; Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2025.103774" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2025.103774</a> <br /><br /><a href="https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105026719840?origin=resultslist" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105026719840?origin=resultslist</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant S A., Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Mysuru Campus, Karnataka, India; S R J.S., Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Mysuru Campus, Karnataka, India; B R S., Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Mysuru Campus, Karnataka, India; M K., Department of Computer Science, School of Sciences, Christ University, Karnataka, Bengaluru, India; Mukhopadhyay A., Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Mysuru Campus, Karnataka, India Description An account of the resource Facial emotion recognition (FER) remains challenging under limited data, noise, and occlusion. This study introduces an ActorCritic Convolutional Deep Belief Network (ACCDBN) that unifies Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)based augmentation, deep probabilistic feature learning, and reinforcement-driven optimization. Conditional GANs expand minority emotion classes, enhancing data diversity, while the CDBN extracts hierarchical texture features through convolutional and restricted Boltzmann layers. An ActorCritic module dynamically refines representations by rewarding accurate emotion classification and penalizing uncertain predictions. Trained and validated on the CK+ dataset with five-fold cross-validation, the proposed model achieves higher accuracy and stability than CNN, LSTM, and ResNet-50 baselines, maintaining strong performance under noise and occlusion. The approach demonstrates how reinforcement-guided generative learning can improve both accuracy and robustness in FER tasks.1. To implement this, the research utilised the publicly available Cohn-Kanade+ dataset, consisting of eight classes with samples of 920 grey-scale images.2. An improved ACCDBN model outperformed with 90.4% accuracy and 0.69 MCC (Mathews Correlation Coefficient) in 5-fold cross-validation using the cGAN-generated dataset and 87% on the CK+ dataset3. The main objective is to present an advanced facial emotion recognition (FER) system that combines a Convolution Deep Belief Network (CDBN) with a model-free reinforcement learning technique, namely the actor-critic approach. 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Subject The topic of the resource Conditional generative adversarial network; Convolutional deep belief network; Face emotion recognition; Improved ACCDBN; Model-free reinforcement learning (actor-critic) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Elsevier B.V. Relation A related resource ISSN: 22150161; Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Article Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource All Open Access; Gold Open Access; Green Open Access Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource online