Interpretable Uncertainty Routing Separating Emotion Ambiguity from Distribution Shift in Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expression recognition (FER) is inherently ambiguous: human annotators frequently disagree, and models deployed in real environments face distribution shift. Crucially, these two conditions demand different downstream actions, as ambiguous in-distribution faces should be reported with their ambiguity whereas out-of-distribution inputs should be rejected. However, a single uncertainty score conflates the two. In this study, uncertainty decomposition into aleatoric and epistemic components for FER is investigated, and Uncertainty-Aware Routing (UAR), an inference-time routing mechanism that exploits the separation, is introduced. Specifically, aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties are obtained from a Deep Ensemble of fully fine-tuned DINOv2 models and are each validated against an independent external signal: aleatoric against human annotator disagreement, and epistemic against distribution shift induced by image corruptions. The proposed dual-validation protocol reveals that aleatoric recovers annotator disagreement with Spearman correlation 0.66 (95% CI: 0.64-0.68), and epistemic detects corruption-induced shifts, achieving average AUROC of 0.699 at the highest corruption severity. UAR retains approximately 1.8 times more ambiguous in-distribution faces than single-uncertainty routing at a matched out-of-distribution rejection rate. A strong label-distribution-learning baseline achieves comparable disagreement recovery but cannot separate ambiguity from shift and therefore cannot route, establishing that the value of decomposition lies in the separation enabling interpretable and differentiated action selection.