M2SE: A Multistage Multitask Instruction Tuning Strategy for Unified Sentiment and Emotion Analysis

Sentiment analysis and emotion recognition are crucial for applications such as human-computer interaction and depression detection. Traditional unimodal methods often fail to capture the complexity of emotional expressions due to conflicting signals from different modalities. Current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) also face challenges in detecting subtle facial expressions and addressing a wide range of emotion-related tasks. To tackle these issues, we propose M2SE, a Multistage Multitask Sentiment and Emotion Instruction Tuning Strategy for general-purpose MLLMs. It employs a combined approach to train models on tasks such as multimodal sentiment analysis, emotion recognition, facial expression recognition, emotion reason inference, and emotion cause-pair extraction. We also introduce the Emotion Multitask dataset (EMT), a custom dataset that supports these five tasks. Our model, Emotion Universe (EmoVerse), is built on a basic MLLM framework without modifications, yet it achieves substantial improvements across these tasks when trained with the M2SE strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EmoVerse outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results in sentiment and emotion tasks. These results highlight the effectiveness of M2SE in enhancing multimodal emotion perception. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/xiaoyaoxinyi/M2SE.

Video-DPRP: A Differentially Private Approach for Visual Privacy-Preserving Video Human Activity Recognition

Considerable effort has been made in privacy-preserving video human activity recognition (HAR). Two primary approaches to ensure privacy preservation in Video HAR are differential privacy (DP) and visual privacy. Techniques enforcing DP during training provide strong theoretical privacy guarantees but offer limited capabilities for visual privacy assessment. Conversely methods, such as low-resolution transformations, data obfuscation and adversarial networks, emphasize visual privacy but lack clear theoretical privacy assurances. In this work, we focus on two main objectives: (1) leveraging DP properties to develop a model-free approach for visual privacy in videos and (2) evaluating our proposed technique using both differential privacy and visual privacy assessments on HAR tasks. To achieve goal (1), we introduce Video-DPRP: a Video-sample-wise Differentially Private Random Projection framework for privacy-preserved video reconstruction for HAR. By using random projections, noise matrices and right singular vectors derived from the singular value decomposition of videos, Video-DPRP reconstructs DP videos using privacy parameters ($\epsilon,\delta$) while enabling visual privacy assessment. For goal (2), using UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets, we compare Video-DPRP's performance on activity recognition with traditional DP methods, and state-of-the-art (SOTA) visual privacy-preserving techniques. Additionally, we assess its effectiveness in preserving privacy-related attributes such as facial features, gender, and skin color, using the PA-HMDB and VISPR datasets. Video-DPRP combines privacy-preservation from both a DP and visual privacy perspective unlike SOTA methods that typically address only one of these aspects.

Frequency Matters: Explaining Biases of Face Recognition in the Frequency Domain

Face recognition (FR) models are vulnerable to performance variations across demographic groups. The causes for these performance differences are unclear due to the highly complex deep learning-based structure of face recognition models. Several works aimed at exploring possible roots of gender and ethnicity bias, identifying semantic reasons such as hairstyle, make-up, or facial hair as possible sources. Motivated by recent discoveries of the importance of frequency patterns in convolutional neural networks, we explain bias in face recognition using state-of-the-art frequency-based explanations. Our extensive results show that different frequencies are important to FR models depending on the ethnicity of the samples.

CG-MER: A Card Game-based Multimodal dataset for Emotion Recognition

The field of affective computing has seen significant advancements in exploring the relationship between emotions and emerging technologies. This paper presents a novel and valuable contribution to this field with the introduction of a comprehensive French multimodal dataset designed specifically for emotion recognition. The dataset encompasses three primary modalities: facial expressions, speech, and gestures, providing a holistic perspective on emotions. Moreover, the dataset has the potential to incorporate additional modalities, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) to expand the scope of emotion recognition research. The dataset was curated through engaging participants in card game sessions, where they were prompted to express a range of emotions while responding to diverse questions. The study included 10 sessions with 20 participants (9 females and 11 males). The dataset serves as a valuable resource for furthering research in emotion recognition and provides an avenue for exploring the intricate connections between human emotions and digital technologies.

On the "Illusion" of Gender Bias in Face Recognition: Explaining the Fairness Issue Through Non-demographic Attributes

Face recognition systems (FRS) exhibit significant accuracy differences based on the user's gender. Since such a gender gap reduces the trustworthiness of FRS, more recent efforts have tried to find the causes. However, these studies make use of manually selected, correlated, and small-sized sets of facial features to support their claims. In this work, we analyse gender bias in face recognition by successfully extending the search domain to decorrelated combinations of 40 non-demographic facial characteristics. First, we propose a toolchain to effectively decorrelate and aggregate facial attributes to enable a less-biased gender analysis on large-scale data. Second, we introduce two new fairness metrics to measure fairness with and without context. Based on these grounds, we thirdly present a novel unsupervised algorithm able to reliably identify attribute combinations that lead to vanishing bias when used as filter predicates for balanced testing datasets. The experiments show that the gender gap vanishes when images of male and female subjects share specific attributes, clearly indicating that the issue is not a question of biology but of the social definition of appearance. These findings could reshape our understanding of fairness in face biometrics and provide insights into FRS, helping to address gender bias issues.

Pairwise Discernment of AffectNet Expressions with ArcFace

This study takes a preliminary step toward teaching computers to recognize human emotions through Facial Emotion Recognition (FER). Transfer learning is applied using ResNeXt, EfficientNet models, and an ArcFace model originally trained on the facial verification task, leveraging the AffectNet database, a collection of human face images annotated with corresponding emotions. The findings highlight the value of congruent domain transfer learning, the challenges posed by imbalanced datasets in learning facial emotion patterns, and the effectiveness of pairwise learning in addressing class imbalances to enhance model performance on the FER task.

Prior-based Objective Inference Mining Potential Uncertainty for Facial Expression Recognition

Annotation ambiguity caused by the inherent subjectivity of visual judgment has always been a major challenge for Facial Expression Recognition (FER) tasks, particularly for largescale datasets from in-the-wild scenarios. A potential solution is the evaluation of relatively objective emotional distributions to help mitigate the ambiguity of subjective annotations. To this end, this paper proposes a novel Prior-based Objective Inference (POI) network. This network employs prior knowledge to derive a more objective and varied emotional distribution and tackles the issue of subjective annotation ambiguity through dynamic knowledge transfer. POI comprises two key networks: Firstly, the Prior Inference Network (PIN) utilizes the prior knowledge of AUs and emotions to capture intricate motion details. To reduce over-reliance on priors and facilitate objective emotional inference, PIN aggregates inferential knowledge from various key facial subregions, encouraging mutual learning. Secondly, the Target Recognition Network (TRN) integrates subjective emotion annotations and objective inference soft labels provided by the PIN, fostering an understanding of inherent facial expression diversity, thus resolving annotation ambiguity. Moreover, we introduce an uncertainty estimation module to quantify and balance facial expression confidence. This module enables a flexible approach to dealing with the uncertainties of subjective annotations. Extensive experiments show that POI exhibits competitive performance on both synthetic noisy datasets and multiple real-world datasets. All codes and training logs will be publicly available at https://github.com/liuhw01/POI.

CLIP Unreasonable Potential in Single-Shot Face Recognition

Face recognition is a core task in computer vision designed to identify and authenticate individuals by analyzing facial patterns and features. This field intersects with artificial intelligence image processing and machine learning with applications in security authentication and personalization. Traditional approaches in facial recognition focus on capturing facial features like the eyes, nose and mouth and matching these against a database to verify identities. However challenges such as high false positive rates have persisted often due to the similarity among individuals facial features. Recently Contrastive Language Image Pretraining (CLIP) a model developed by OpenAI has shown promising advancements by linking natural language processing with vision tasks allowing it to generalize across modalities. Using CLIP's vision language correspondence and single-shot finetuning the model can achieve lower false positive rates upon deployment without the need of mass facial features extraction. This integration demonstrating CLIP's potential to address persistent issues in face recognition model performance without complicating our training paradigm.

7ABAW-Compound Expression Recognition via Curriculum Learning

With the advent of deep learning, expression recognition has made significant advancements. However, due to the limited availability of annotated compound expression datasets and the subtle variations of compound expressions, Compound Emotion Recognition (CE) still holds considerable potential for exploration. To advance this task, the 7th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition introduces the Compound Expression Challenge based on C-EXPR-DB, a limited dataset without labels. In this paper, we present a curriculum learning-based framework that initially trains the model on single-expression tasks and subsequently incorporates multi-expression data. This design ensures that our model first masters the fundamental features of basic expressions before being exposed to the complexities of compound emotions. Specifically, our designs can be summarized as follows: 1) Single-Expression Pre-training: The model is first trained on datasets containing single expressions to learn the foundational facial features associated with basic emotions. 2) Dynamic Compound Expression Generation: Given the scarcity of annotated compound expression datasets, we employ CutMix and Mixup techniques on the original single-expression images to create hybrid images exhibiting characteristics of multiple basic emotions. 3) Incremental Multi-Expression Integration: After performing well on single-expression tasks, the model is progressively exposed to multi-expression data, allowing the model to adapt to the complexity and variability of compound expressions. The official results indicate that our method achieves the \textbf{best} performance in this competition track with an F-score of 0.6063. Our code is released at https://github.com/YenanLiu/ABAW7th.

Smile upon the Face but Sadness in the Eyes: Emotion Recognition based on Facial Expressions and Eye Behaviors

Emotion Recognition (ER) is the process of identifying human emotions from given data. Currently, the field heavily relies on facial expression recognition (FER) because facial expressions contain rich emotional cues. However, it is important to note that facial expressions may not always precisely reflect genuine emotions and FER-based results may yield misleading ER. To understand and bridge this gap between FER and ER, we introduce eye behaviors as an important emotional cues for the creation of a new Eye-behavior-aided Multimodal Emotion Recognition (EMER) dataset. Different from existing multimodal ER datasets, the EMER dataset employs a stimulus material-induced spontaneous emotion generation method to integrate non-invasive eye behavior data, like eye movements and eye fixation maps, with facial videos, aiming to obtain natural and accurate human emotions. Notably, for the first time, we provide annotations for both ER and FER in the EMER, enabling a comprehensive analysis to better illustrate the gap between both tasks. Furthermore, we specifically design a new EMERT architecture to concurrently enhance performance in both ER and FER by efficiently identifying and bridging the emotion gap between the two.Specifically, our EMERT employs modality-adversarial feature decoupling and multi-task Transformer to augment the modeling of eye behaviors, thus providing an effective complement to facial expressions. In the experiment, we introduce seven multimodal benchmark protocols for a variety of comprehensive evaluations of the EMER dataset. The results show that the EMERT outperforms other state-of-the-art multimodal methods by a great margin, revealing the importance of modeling eye behaviors for robust ER. To sum up, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the importance of eye behaviors in ER, advancing the study on addressing the gap between FER and ER for more robust ER performance.