Xiaohua's research on emotion recognition, particularly using deep learning, was supported by the Jorma Ollila Grant 2017 from the Nokia Foundation. More recently, he has secured funding from the Finnish Cultural Foundation (Central Fund) and the Kaute Foundation (AI Fund) to advance his research in micro-expression analysis. He has also contributed to two Tekes-funded projects: "Facial Behavior Analysis 'in-the-wild'" and "Quantifying Human Experience for Increased Intelligence within Work Teams and in the Customer Interface."

His current research interests encompass human behavior analysis (including facial expression, micro-expression, group-level emotion recognition, and pain intensity estimation), affective computing (speech, multimodal and cross-database emotion recognition), face recognition, and texture analysis. Xiaohua is also focused on applying machine learning, computer vision, and deep learning to these domains.