Hyung-Jeong Yang

Dang-Khanh Nguyen, Ngoc-Huynh Ho, Sudarshan Pant et al.

In recent years, transformer architecture has been a dominating paradigm in many applications, including affective computing. In this report, we propose our transformer-based model to handle Emotion Classification Task in the 5th Affective Behavior Analysis In-the-wild Competition. By leveraging the attentive model and the synthetic dataset, we attain a score of 0.4775 on the validation set of Aff-Wild2, the dataset provided by the organizer.

Vu Ngoc Tu, Van Thong Huynh, Hyung-Jeong Yang et al.

Conversational engagement estimation is posed as a regression problem, entailing the identification of the favorable attention and involvement of the participants in the conversation. This task arises as a crucial pursuit to gain insights into human's interaction dynamics and behavior patterns within a conversation. In this research, we introduce a dilated convolutional Transformer for modeling and estimating human engagement in the MULTIMEDIATE 2023 competition. Our proposed system surpasses the baseline models, exhibiting a noteworthy $7$\% improvement on test set and $4$\% on validation set. Moreover, we employ different modality fusion mechanism and show that for this type of data, a simple concatenated method with self-attention fusion gains the best performance.

Duy Le Hoai, Eunchae Lim, Eunbin Choi et al.

Facial Action Coding System is an approach for modeling the complexity of human emotional expression. Automatic action unit (AU) detection is a crucial research area in human-computer interaction. This paper describes our submission to the third Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition 2022. We proposed a method for detecting facial action units in the video. At the first stage, a lightweight CNN-based feature extractor is employed to extract the feature map from each video frame. Then, an attention module is applied to refine the attention map. The attention encoded vector is derived using a weighted sum of the feature map and the attention scores later. Finally, the sigmoid function is used at the output layer to make the prediction suitable for multi-label AUs detection. We achieved a macro F1 score of 0.48 on the ABAW challenge validation set compared to 0.39 from the baseline model.

Hong-Hai Nguyen, Ngumimi Karen Iyortsuun, Seungwon Kim et al.

The human brain remains continuously active, whether an individual is working or at rest. Mental activity is a daily process, and if the brain becomes excessively active, known as overload, it can adversely affect human health. Recently, advancements in early prediction of mental health conditions have emerged, aiming to prevent serious consequences and enhance the overall quality of life. Consequently, the estimation of mental status has garnered significant attention from diverse researchers due to its potential benefits. While various signals are employed to assess mental state, the electroencephalogram, containing extensive information about the brain, is widely utilized by researchers. In this paper, we categorize mental workload into three states (low, middle, and high) and estimate a continuum of mental workload levels. Our method leverages information from multiple spatial dimensions to achieve optimal results in mental estimation. For the time domain approach, we employ Temporal Convolutional Networks. In the frequency domain, we introduce a novel architecture based on combining residual blocks, termed the Multi-Dimensional Residual Block. The integration of these two domains yields significant results compared to individual estimates in each domain. Our approach achieved a 74.98% accuracy in the three-class classification, surpassing the provided data results at 69.00%. Specially, our method demonstrates efficacy in estimating continuous levels, evidenced by a corresponding Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) result of 0.629. The combination of time and frequency domain analysis in our approach highlights the exciting potential to improve healthcare applications in the future.

Irfan Haider, Minh-Trieu Tran, Soo-Hyung Kim et al.

This paper illustrates our submission method to the fourth Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-Wild (ABAW) Competition. The method is used for the Multi-Task Learning Challenge. Instead of using only face information, we employ full information from a provided dataset containing face and the context around the face. We utilized the InceptionNet V3 model to extract deep features then we applied the attention mechanism to refine the features. After that, we put those features into the transformer block and multi-layer perceptron networks to get the final multiple kinds of emotion. Our model predicts arousal and valence, classifies the emotional expression and estimates the action units simultaneously. The proposed system achieves the performance of 0.917 on the MTL Challenge validation dataset.

Dang-Khanh Nguyen, Sudarshan Pant, Ngoc-Huynh Ho et al.

Facial behavior analysis is a broad topic with various categories such as facial emotion recognition, age, and gender recognition. Many studies focus on individual tasks while the multi-task learning approach is still an open research issue and requires more research. In this paper, we present our solution and experiment result for the Multi-Task Learning challenge of the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild competition. The challenge is a combination of three tasks: action unit detection, facial expression recognition, and valance-arousal estimation. To address this challenge, we introduce a cross-attentive module to improve multi-task learning performance. Additionally, a facial graph is applied to capture the association among action units. As a result, we achieve the evaluation measure of 128.8 on the validation data provided by the organizers, which outperforms the baseline result of 30.

Van Thong Huynh, Hyung-Jeong Yang, Guee-Sang Lee et al.

Generic event boundary detection (GEBD) aims to split video into chunks at a broad and diverse set of actions as humans naturally perceive event boundaries. In this study, we present an approach that considers the correlation between neighbor frames with pyramid feature maps in both spatial and temporal dimensions to construct a framework for localizing generic events in video. The features at multiple spatial dimensions of a pre-trained ResNet-50 are exploited with different views in the temporal dimension to form a temporal pyramid feature map. Based on that, the similarity between neighbor frames is calculated and projected to build a temporal pyramid similarity feature vector. A decoder with 1D convolution operations is used to decode these similarities to a new representation that incorporates their temporal relationship for later boundary score estimation. Extensive experiments conducted on the GEBD benchmark dataset show the effectiveness of our system and its variations, in which we outperformed the state-of-the-art approaches. Additional experiments on TAPOS dataset, which contains long-form videos with Olympic sport actions, demonstrated the effectiveness of our study compared to others.

Dang-Khanh Nguyen, Sudarshan Pant, Ngoc-Huynh Ho et al.

The ACII Affective Vocal Bursts (A-VB) competition introduces a new topic in affective computing, which is understanding emotional expression using the non-verbal sound of humans. We are familiar with emotion recognition via verbal vocal or facial expression. However, the vocal bursts such as laughs, cries, and signs, are not exploited even though they are very informative for behavior analysis. The A-VB competition comprises four tasks that explore non-verbal information in different spaces. This technical report describes the method and the result of SclabCNU Team for the tasks of the challenge. We achieved promising results compared to the baseline model provided by the organizers.

Minh-Duc Nguyen, Hyung-Jeong Yang, Soo-Hyung Kim et al.

Accurate pain assessment is crucial in healthcare for effective diagnosis and treatment; however, traditional methods relying on self-reporting are inadequate for populations unable to communicate their pain. Cutting-edge AI is promising for supporting clinicians in pain recognition using facial video data. In this paper, we enhance pain recognition by employing facial video analysis within a Transformer-based deep learning model. By combining a powerful Masked Autoencoder with a Transformers-based classifier, our model effectively captures pain level indicators through both expressions and micro-expressions. We conducted our experiment on the AI4Pain dataset, which produced promising results that pave the way for innovative healthcare solutions that are both comprehensive and objective.

Duy-Phuong Dao, Muhammad Taqiyuddin, Jahae Kim et al.

Latent diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative models in medical imaging, enabling the synthesis of high quality brain magnetic resonance imaging scans. In particular, predicting the evolution of a patients brain can aid in early intervention, prognosis, and treatment planning. In this study, we introduce CLIMB, Controllable Longitudinal brain Image generation via state space based latent diffusion model, an advanced framework for modeling temporal changes in brain structure. CLIMB is designed to model the structural evolution of the brain structure over time, utilizing a baseline MRI scan and its acquisition age as foundational inputs. Additionally, multiple conditional variables, including projected age, gender, disease status, genetic information, and brain structure volumes, are incorporated to enhance the temporal modeling of anatomical changes. Unlike existing LDM methods that rely on self attention modules, which effectively capture contextual information from input images but are computationally expensive, our approach leverages state space, a state space model architecture that substantially reduces computational overhead while preserving high-quality image synthesis. Furthermore, we introduce a Gaussian-aligned autoencoder that extracts latent representations conforming to prior distributions without the sampling noise inherent in conventional variational autoencoders. We train and evaluate our proposed model on the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative dataset, consisting of 6,306 MRI scans from 1,390 participants. By comparing generated images with real MRI scans, CLIMB achieves a structural similarity index of 0.9433, demonstrating notable improvements over existing methods.

Minh-Duc Nguyen, Hyung-Jeong Yang, Seung-Won Kim et al.

The creation of listener facial responses aims to simulate interactive communication feedback from a listener during a face-to-face conversation. Our goal is to generate believable videos of listeners' heads that respond authentically to a single speaker by a sequence-to-sequence model with an combination of WaveNet and Long short-term memory network. Our approach focuses on capturing the subtle nuances of listener feedback, ensuring the preservation of individual listener identity while expressing appropriate attitudes and viewpoints. Experiment results show that our method surpasses the baseline models on ViCo benchmark Dataset.

Hoang-Son Vo, Quang-Vinh Nguyen, Seungwon Kim et al.

Audio-driven talking head generation requires precise synchronization between facial animations and audio signals. This paper introduces ATL-Diff, a novel approach addressing synchronization limitations while reducing noise and computational costs. Our framework features three key components: a Landmark Generation Module converting audio to facial landmarks, a Landmarks-Guide Noise approach that decouples audio by distributing noise according to landmarks, and a 3D Identity Diffusion network preserving identity characteristics. Experiments on MEAD and CREMA-D datasets demonstrate that ATL-Diff outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all metrics. Our approach achieves near real-time processing with high-quality animations, computational efficiency, and exceptional preservation of facial nuances. This advancement offers promising applications for virtual assistants, education, medical communication, and digital platforms. The source code is available at: \href{https://github.com/sonvth/ATL-Diff}{https://github.com/sonvth/ATL-Diff}

Quang Vinh Nguyen, Minh Duc Nguyen, Thanh Hoang Son Vo et al.

Automated Radiology report generation (RRG) aims at producing detailed descriptions of medical images, reducing radiologists' workload and improving access to high-quality diagnostic services. Existing encoder-decoder models only rely on visual features extracted from raw input images, which can limit the understanding of spatial structures and semantic relationships, often resulting in suboptimal text generation. To address this, we propose Anatomical Attention Alignment Network (A3Net), a framework that enhance visual-textual understanding by constructing hyper-visual representations. Our approach integrates a knowledge dictionary of anatomical structures with patch-level visual features, enabling the model to effectively associate image regions with their corresponding anatomical entities. This structured representation improves semantic reasoning, interpretability, and cross-modal alignment, ultimately enhancing the accuracy and clinical relevance of generated reports. Experimental results on IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR datasets demonstrate that A3Net significantly improves both visual perception and text generation quality. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/Vinh-AI/A3Net}{GitHub}.

Van Thong Huynh, Soo-Hyung Kim, Guee-Sang Lee et al.

In this paper, we present a multi-class eye segmentation method that can run the hardware limitations for real-time inference. Our approach includes three major stages: get a grayscale image from the input, segment three distinct eye region with a deep network, and remove incorrect areas with heuristic filters. Our model based on the encoder decoder structure with the key is the depthwise convolution operation to reduce the computation cost. We experiment on OpenEDS, a large scale dataset of eye images captured by a head-mounted display with two synchronized eye facing cameras. We achieved the mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 94.85% with a model of size 0.4 megabytes. The source code are available https://github.com/th2l/Eye_VR_Segmentation

Minh-Duc Nguyen, Hyung-Jeong Yang, Soo-Hyung Kim et al.

The dyadic reaction generation task involves synthesizing responsive facial reactions that align closely with the behaviors of a conversational partner, enhancing the naturalness and effectiveness of human-like interaction simulations. This paper introduces a novel approach, the Latent Behavior Diffusion Model, comprising a context-aware autoencoder and a diffusion-based conditional generator that addresses the challenge of generating diverse and contextually relevant facial reactions from input speaker behaviors. The autoencoder compresses high-dimensional input features, capturing dynamic patterns in listener reactions while condensing complex input data into a concise latent representation, facilitating more expressive and contextually appropriate reaction synthesis. The diffusion-based conditional generator operates on the latent space generated by the autoencoder to predict realistic facial reactions in a non-autoregressive manner. This approach allows for generating diverse facial reactions that reflect subtle variations in conversational cues and emotional states. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving superior performance in dyadic reaction synthesis tasks compared to existing methods.

Duy-Phuong Dao, Hyung-Jeong Yang, Jahae Kim

Alzheimers disease progresses slowly and involves complex interaction between various biological factors. Longitudinal medical imaging data can capture this progression over time. However, longitudinal data frequently encounter issues such as missing data due to patient dropouts, irregular follow-up intervals, and varying lengths of observation periods. To address these issues, we designed a diffusion-based model for 3D longitudinal medical imaging generation using single magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This involves the injection of a conditioning MRI and time-visit encoding to the model, enabling control in change between source and target images. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method generates higher-quality images compared to other competing methods.

Phan Tran Dac Thinh, Hoang Manh Hung, Hyung-Jeong Yang et al.

The task of predicting affective information in the wild such as seven basic emotions or action units from human faces has gradually become more interesting due to the accessibility and availability of massive annotated datasets. In this study, we propose a method that utilizes the association between seven basic emotions and twelve action units from the AffWild2 dataset. The method based on the architecture of ResNet50 involves the multi-task learning technique for the incomplete labels of the two tasks. By combining the knowledge for two correlated tasks, both performances are improved by a large margin compared to those with the model employing only one kind of label.

VanThong Huynh, Guee-Sang Lee, Hyung-Jeong Yang et al.

This paper presents an approach for Evoked Expressions from Videos (EEV) challenge, which aims to predict evoked facial expressions from video. We take advantage of pre-trained models on large-scale datasets in computer vision and audio signals to extract the deep representation of timestamps in the video. A temporal convolution network, rather than an RNN like architecture, is used to explore temporal relationships due to its advantage in memory consumption and parallelism. Furthermore, to address the missing annotations of some timestamps, positional encoding is employed to ensure continuity of input data when discarding these timestamps during training. We achieved state-of-the-art results on the EEV challenge with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.05477, the first ranked performance in the EEV 2021 challenge.

Hoang Manh Hung, Hyung-Jeong Yang, Soo-Hyung Kim et al.

Emotion recognition has become a major problem in computer vision in recent years that made a lot of effort by researchers to overcome the difficulties in this task. In the field of affective computing, emotion recognition has a wide range of applications, such as healthcare, robotics, human-computer interaction. Due to its practical importance for other tasks, many techniques and approaches have been investigated for different problems and various data sources. Nevertheless, comprehensive fusion of the audio-visual and language modalities to get the benefits from them is still a problem to solve. In this paper, we present and discuss our classification methodology for MuSe-Topic Sub-challenge, as well as the data and results. For the topic classification, we ensemble two language models which are ALBERT and RoBERTa to predict 10 classes of topics. Moreover, for the classification of valence and arousal, SVM and Random forests are employed in conjunction with feature selection to enhance the performance.