No Arabic abstract
When recognizing emotions, subtle nuances of emotion displays often cause ambiguity or uncertainty in emotion perception. Unfortunately, the ambiguity or uncertainty cannot be reflected in hard emotion labels. Emotion predictions with uncertainty can be useful for risk controlling, but they are relatively scarce in current deep models for emotion recognition. To address this issue, we propose to apply the multi-generational self-distillation algorithm to emotion recognition task towards better uncertainty estimation performance. We firstly use deep ensembles to capture uncertainty, as an approximation to Bayesian methods. Secondly, the deep ensemble provides soft labels to its student models, while the student models can learn from the uncertainty embedded in those soft labels. Thirdly, we iteratively train deep ensembles to further improve the performance of emotion recognition and uncertainty estimation. In the end, our algorithm results in a single student model that can estimate in-domain uncertainty and a student ensemble that can detect out-of-domain samples. We trained our Efficient Multitask Emotion Networks (EMENet) on the Aff-wild2 dataset, and conducted extensive experiments on emotion recognition and uncertainty estimation. Our algorithm gives more reliable uncertainty estimates than Temperature Scaling and Monte Carol Dropout.
In this work, we introduce our submission to the 2nd Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) 2021 competition. We train a unified deep learning model on multi-databases to perform two tasks: seven basic facial expressions prediction and valence-arousal estimation. Since these databases do not contains labels for all the two tasks, we have applied the distillation knowledge technique to train two networks: one teacher and one student model. The student model will be trained using both ground truth labels and soft labels derived from the pretrained teacher model. During the training, we add one more task, which is the combination of the two mentioned tasks, for better exploiting inter-task correlations. We also exploit the sharing videos between the two tasks of the AffWild2 database that is used in the competition, to further improve the performance of the network. Experiment results shows that the network have achieved promising results on the validation set of the AffWild2 database. Code and pretrained model are publicly available at https://github.com/glmanhtu/multitask-abaw-2021
Deep learning models trained on audio-visual data have been successfully used to achieve state-of-the-art performance for emotion recognition. In particular, models trained with multitask learning have shown additional performance improvements. However, such multitask models entangle information between the tasks, encoding the mutual dependencies present in label distributions in the real world data used for training. This work explores the disentanglement of multimodal signal representations for the primary task of emotion recognition and a secondary person identification task. In particular, we developed a multitask framework to extract low-dimensional embeddings that aim to capture emotion specific information, while containing minimal information related to person identity. We evaluate three different techniques for disentanglement and report results of up to 13% disentanglement while maintaining emotion recognition performance.
Adversarial training (AT) has been demonstrated as one of the most promising defense methods against various adversarial attacks. To our knowledge, existing AT-based methods usually train with the locally most adversarial perturbed points and treat all the perturbed points equally, which may lead to considerably weaker adversarial robust generalization on test data. In this work, we introduce a new adversarial training framework that considers the diversity as well as characteristics of the perturbed points in the vicinity of benign samples. To realize the framework, we propose a Regional Adversarial Training (RAT) defense method that first utilizes the attack path generated by the typical iterative attack method of projected gradient descent (PGD), and constructs an adversarial region based on the attack path. Then, RAT samples diverse perturbed training points efficiently inside this region, and utilizes a distance-aware label smoothing mechanism to capture our intuition that perturbed points at different locations should have different impact on the model performance. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that RAT consistently makes significant improvement on standard adversarial training (SAT), and exhibits better robust generalization.
Although much progress has been made in visual emotion recognition, researchers have realized that modern deep networks tend to exploit dataset characteristics to learn spurious statistical associations between the input and the target. Such dataset characteristics are usually treated as dataset bias, which damages the robustness and generalization performance of these recognition systems. In this work, we scrutinize this problem from the perspective of causal inference, where such dataset characteristic is termed as a confounder which misleads the system to learn the spurious correlation. To alleviate the negative effects brought by the dataset bias, we propose a novel Interventional Emotion Recognition Network (IERN) to achieve the backdoor adjustment, which is one fundamental deconfounding technique in causal inference. A series of designed tests validate the effectiveness of IERN, and experiments on three emotion benchmarks demonstrate that IERN outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.
Global covariance pooling in convolutional neural networks has achieved impressive improvement over the classical first-order pooling. Recent works have shown matrix square root normalization plays a central role in achieving state-of-the-art performance. However, existing methods depend heavily on eigendecomposition (EIG) or singular value decomposition (SVD), suffering from inefficient training due to limited support of EIG and SVD on GPU. Towards addressing this problem, we propose an iterative matrix square root normalization method for fast end-to-end training of global covariance pooling networks. At the core of our method is a meta-layer designed with loop-embedded directed graph structure. The meta-layer consists of three consecutive nonlinear structured layers, which perform pre-normalization, coupled matrix iteration and post-compensation, respectively. Our method is much faster than EIG or SVD based ones, since it involves only matrix multiplications, suitable for parallel implementation on GPU. Moreover, the proposed network with ResNet architecture can converge in much less epochs, further accelerating network training. On large-scale ImageNet, we achieve competitive performance superior to existing counterparts. By finetuning our models pre-trained on ImageNet, we establish state-of-the-art results on three challenging fine-grained benchmarks. The source code and network models will be available at http://www.peihuali.org/iSQRT-COV