Abstract
Online dating has become the dominant way romantic relationships begin, yet current platforms strip the nonverbal cues: gaze, facial expression, body posture, response timing, that humans rely on to signal comfort, disinterest, and consent, creating a communication gap with disproportionate safety consequences for women. We argue that this gap represents both a technical opportunity and a moral responsibility for the computer vision community, which has developed the affective tools, facial action unit detection, gaze estimation, engagement modeling, and multimodal affect recognition, needed to begin addressing it, yet has largely ignored the dating domain as a research context. We propose a fairness-first research agenda organized around four capability areas: real-time discomfort detection, engagement asymmetry modeling between partners, consent-aware interaction design, and longitudinal interaction summarization, each grounded in established CV methodology and motivated by the social psychology of romantic communication. We argue that responsible pursuit of this agenda requires purpose-built datasets collected under dyadic consent protocols, fairness evaluation disaggregated across race, gender identity, neurotype, and cultural background, and architectural commitments to on-device processing that prevent affective data from becoming platform surveillance infrastructure. This vision paper calls on the WICV community, whose members are uniquely positioned to understand both the technical opportunity and the human stakes, to establish online dating safety as a first-class research domain before commercial deployment outpaces ethical deliberation.
Abstract (translated)
在线约会已成为 romantic relationships 开始的主要方式，但现有平台剥离了人类赖以 signaling comfort, disinterest, and consent 的非语言线索：目光、面部表情、身体姿态、回应时机，从而造成了沟通鸿沟，并对女性产生不成比例的安全后果。我们认为，这一鸿沟既代表了计算机视觉社区的技术机遇，也构成了其道德责任——该社区已开发出解决此问题所需的情感计算工具：面部动作单元检测、视线估计、参与度建模与多模态情感识别，却 largely ignored 将约会领域作为研究背景。我们提出一个以公平优先的研究议程，围绕四个能力领域组织：实时不适检测、伴侣间参与度不对称建模、注重同意的交互设计、以及纵向交互摘要，每个领域都基于成熟的 CV 方法论，并受浪漫沟通的社会心理学驱动。我们主张，负责任地推进此议程需要：在双主体同意协议下收集的专用数据集；按种族、性别认同、神经类型和文化背景 disaggregated 的公平性评估；以及坚持设备端处理的架构设计，以防止情感数据沦为平台监控基础设施。这篇愿景论文呼吁 WICV 社区——其成员既理解技术机遇又深知人文关切的独特位置——在商业部署超越伦理审议前，将在线约会安全确立为一级研究领域。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26727
