Jiantao Nie

Jia Li, Yin Chen, Xuesong Zhang et al.

In this paper, we present our advanced solutions to the two sub-challenges of Affective Behavior Analysis in the wild (ABAW) 2023: the Emotional Reaction Intensity (ERI) Estimation Challenge and Expression (Expr) Classification Challenge. ABAW 2023 aims to tackle the challenge of affective behavior analysis in natural contexts, with the ultimate goal of creating intelligent machines and robots that possess the ability to comprehend human emotions, feelings, and behaviors. For the Expression Classification Challenge, we propose a streamlined approach that handles the challenges of classification effectively. However, our main contribution lies in our use of diverse models and tools to extract multimodal features such as audio and video cues from the Hume-Reaction dataset. By studying, analyzing, and combining these features, we significantly enhance the model's accuracy for sentiment prediction in a multimodal context. Furthermore, our method achieves outstanding results on the Emotional Reaction Intensity (ERI) Estimation Challenge, surpassing the baseline method by an impressive 84\% increase, as measured by the Pearson Coefficient, on the validation dataset.

Jia Li, Jiantao Nie, Dan Guo et al.

Representation learning and feature disentanglement have garnered significant research interest in the field of facial expression recognition (FER). The inherent ambiguity of emotion labels poses challenges for conventional supervised representation learning methods. Moreover, directly learning the mapping from a facial expression image to an emotion label lacks explicit supervision signals for capturing fine-grained facial features. In this paper, we propose a novel FER model, named Poker Face Vision Transformer or PF-ViT, to address these challenges. PF-ViT aims to separate and recognize the disturbance-agnostic emotion from a static facial image via generating its corresponding poker face, without the need for paired images. Inspired by the Facial Action Coding System, we regard an expressive face as the combined result of a set of facial muscle movements on one's poker face (i.e., an emotionless face). PF-ViT utilizes vanilla Vision Transformers, and its components are firstly pre-trained as Masked Autoencoders on a large facial expression dataset without emotion labels, yielding excellent representations. Subsequently, we train PF-ViT using a GAN framework. During training, the auxiliary task of poke face generation promotes the disentanglement between emotional and emotion-irrelevant components, guiding the FER model to holistically capture discriminative facial details. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, surpassing the state-of-the-art methods on four popular FER datasets.