Yang Liu

Yang Liu, Xingming Zhang, Janne Kauttonen et al.

High-quality annotated images are significant to deep facial expression recognition (FER) methods. However, uncertain labels, mostly existing in large-scale public datasets, often mislead the training process. In this paper, we achieve uncertain label correction of facial expressions using auxiliary action unit (AU) graphs, called ULC-AG. Specifically, a weighted regularization module is introduced to highlight valid samples and suppress category imbalance in every batch. Based on the latent dependency between emotions and AUs, an auxiliary branch using graph convolutional layers is added to extract the semantic information from graph topologies. Finally, a re-labeling strategy corrects the ambiguous annotations by comparing their feature similarities with semantic templates. Experiments show that our ULC-AG achieves 89.31% and 61.57% accuracy on RAF-DB and AffectNet datasets, respectively, outperforming the baseline and state-of-the-art methods.

Yang Liu, Xingming Zhang, Janne Kauttonen et al.

Deep models for facial expression recognition achieve high performance by training on large-scale labeled data. However, publicly available datasets contain uncertain facial expressions caused by ambiguous annotations or confusing emotions, which could severely decline the robustness. Previous studies usually follow the bias elimination method in general tasks without considering the uncertainty problem from the perspective of different corresponding sources. In this paper, we propose a novel method of multi-task assisted correction in addressing uncertain facial expression recognition called MTAC. Specifically, a confidence estimation block and a weighted regularization module are applied to highlight solid samples and suppress uncertain samples in every batch. In addition, two auxiliary tasks, i.e., action unit detection and valence-arousal measurement, are introduced to learn semantic distributions from a data-driven AU graph and mitigate category imbalance based on latent dependencies between discrete and continuous emotions, respectively. Moreover, a re-labeling strategy guided by feature-level similarity constraint further generates new labels for identified uncertain samples to promote model learning. The proposed method can flexibly combine with existing frameworks in a fully-supervised or weakly-supervised manner. Experiments on RAF-DB, AffectNet, and AffWild2 datasets demonstrate that the MTAC obtains substantial improvements over baselines when facing synthetic and real uncertainties and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Zihao Zhao, Yuzhu Mao, Zhenpeng Shi et al.

The widespread adoption of Federated Learning (FL), a privacy-preserving distributed learning methodology, has been impeded by the challenge of high communication overheads, typically arising from the transmission of large-scale models. Existing adaptive quantization methods, designed to mitigate these overheads, operate under the impractical assumption of uniform device participation in every training round. Additionally, these methods are limited in their adaptability due to the necessity of manual quantization level selection and often overlook biases inherent in local devices' data, thereby affecting the robustness of the global model. In response, this paper introduces AQUILA (adaptive quantization in device selection strategy), a novel adaptive framework devised to effectively handle these issues, enhancing the efficiency and robustness of FL. AQUILA integrates a sophisticated device selection method that prioritizes the quality and usefulness of device updates. Utilizing the exact global model stored by devices, it enables a more precise device selection criterion, reduces model deviation, and limits the need for hyperparameter adjustments. Furthermore, AQUILA presents an innovative quantization criterion, optimized to improve communication efficiency while assuring model convergence. Our experiments demonstrate that AQUILA significantly decreases communication costs compared to existing methods, while maintaining comparable model performance across diverse non-homogeneous FL settings, such as Non-IID data and heterogeneous model architectures.

Yang Liu, Yuexian Hou

Humor recognition has been extensively studied with different methods in the past years. However, existing studies on humor recognition do not understand the mechanisms that generate humor. In this paper, inspired by the incongruity theory, any joke can be divided into two components (the setup and the punchline). Both components have multiple possible semantics, and there is an incongruous relationship between them. We use density matrices to represent the semantic uncertainty of the setup and the punchline, respectively, and design QE-Uncertainty and QE-Incongruity with the help of quantum entropy as features for humor recognition. The experimental results on the SemEval2021 Task 7 dataset show that the proposed features are more effective than the baselines for recognizing humorous and non-humorous texts.

Gianmarco Ipinze Tutuianu, Yang Liu, Ari Alamäki et al.

Facial expression recognition (FER) is a crucial part of human-computer interaction. Existing FER methods achieve high accuracy and generalization based on different open-source deep models and training approaches. However, the performance of these methods is not always good when encountering practical settings, which are seldom explored. In this paper, we collected a new in-the-wild facial expression dataset for cross-domain validation. Twenty-three commonly used network architectures were implemented and evaluated following a uniform protocol. Moreover, various setups, in terms of input resolutions, class balance management, and pre-trained strategies, were verified to show the corresponding performance contribution. Based on extensive experiments on three large-scale FER datasets and our practical cross-validation, we ranked network architectures and summarized a set of recommendations on deploying deep FER methods in real scenarios. In addition, potential ethical rules, privacy issues, and regulations were discussed in practical FER applications such as marketing, education, and entertainment business.

Qixuan Zhang, Zhifeng Wang, Yang Liu et al.

In this paper, we present a novel benchmark for Emotion Recognition using facial landmarks extracted from realistic news videos. Traditional methods relying on RGB images are resource-intensive, whereas our approach with Facial Landmark Emotion Recognition (FLER) offers a simplified yet effective alternative. By leveraging Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to analyze the geometric and spatial relationships of facial landmarks, our method enhances the understanding and accuracy of emotion recognition. We discuss the advancements and challenges in deep learning techniques for emotion recognition, particularly focusing on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers. Our experimental results demonstrate the viability and potential of our dataset as a benchmark, setting a new direction for future research in emotion recognition technologies. The codes and models are at: https://github.com/wangzhifengharrison/benchmark_real_news

Zhenhong Zhou, Haiyang Yu, Xinghua Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple language tasks, yet their safety guardrails can be circumvented, leading to harmful generations. In light of this, recent research on safety mechanisms has emerged, revealing that when safety representations or component are suppressed, the safety capability of LLMs are compromised. However, existing research tends to overlook the safety impact of multi-head attention mechanisms, despite their crucial role in various model functionalities. Hence, in this paper, we aim to explore the connection between standard attention mechanisms and safety capability to fill this gap in the safety-related mechanistic interpretability. We propose a novel metric which tailored for multi-head attention, the Safety Head ImPortant Score (Ships), to assess the individual heads' contributions to model safety. Based on this, we generalize Ships to the dataset level and further introduce the Safety Attention Head AttRibution Algorithm (Sahara) to attribute the critical safety attention heads inside the model. Our findings show that the special attention head has a significant impact on safety. Ablating a single safety head allows aligned model (e.g., Llama-2-7b-chat) to respond to 16 times more harmful queries, while only modifying 0.006% of the parameters, in contrast to the ~ 5% modification required in previous studies. More importantly, we demonstrate that attention heads primarily function as feature extractors for safety and models fine-tuned from the same base model exhibit overlapping safety heads through comprehensive experiments. Together, our attribution approach and findings provide a novel perspective for unpacking the black box of safety mechanisms within large models.

Xiaokun Wang, Peiyu Wang, Jiangbo Pei et al.

We propose Skywork-VL Reward, a multimodal reward model that provides reward signals for both multimodal understanding and reasoning tasks. Our technical approach comprises two key components: First, we construct a large-scale multimodal preference dataset that covers a wide range of tasks and scenarios, with responses collected from both standard vision-language models (VLMs) and advanced VLM reasoners. Second, we design a reward model architecture based on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, integrating a reward head and applying multi-stage fine-tuning using pairwise ranking loss on pairwise preference data. Experimental evaluations show that Skywork-VL Reward achieves state-of-the-art results on multimodal VL-RewardBench and exhibits competitive performance on the text-only RewardBench benchmark. Furthermore, preference data constructed based on our Skywork-VL Reward proves highly effective for training Mixed Preference Optimization (MPO), leading to significant improvements in multimodal reasoning capabilities. Our results underscore Skywork-VL Reward as a significant advancement toward general-purpose, reliable reward models for multimodal alignment. Our model has been publicly released to promote transparency and reproducibility.

Yuan Mi, Pu Ren, Hongteng Xu et al.

Data-centric methods have shown great potential in understanding and predicting spatiotemporal dynamics, enabling better design and control of the object system. However, deep learning models often lack interpretability, fail to obey intrinsic physics, and struggle to cope with the various domains. While geometry-based methods, e.g., graph neural networks (GNNs), have been proposed to further tackle these challenges, they still need to find the implicit physical laws from large datasets and rely excessively on rich labeled data. In this paper, we herein introduce the conservation-informed GNN (CiGNN), an end-to-end explainable learning framework, to learn spatiotemporal dynamics based on limited training data. The network is designed to conform to the general conservation law via symmetry, where conservative and non-conservative information passes over a multiscale space enhanced by a latent temporal marching strategy. The efficacy of our model has been verified in various spatiotemporal systems based on synthetic and real-world datasets, showing superiority over baseline models. Results demonstrate that CiGNN exhibits remarkable accuracy and generalizability, and is readily applicable to learning for prediction of various spatiotemporal dynamics in a spatial domain with complex geometry.

Xinwei Long, Kai Tian, Peng Xu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have taken a great step towards AGI. Meanwhile, an increasing number of domain-specific problems such as math and programming boost these general-purpose models to continuously evolve via learning deeper expertise. Now is thus the time further to extend the diversity of specialized applications for knowledgeable LLMs, though collecting high quality data with unexpected and informative tasks is challenging. In this paper, we propose to use advertisement (ad) videos as a challenging test-bed to probe the ability of LLMs in perceiving beyond the objective physical content of common visual domain. Our motivation is to take full advantage of the clue-rich and information-dense ad videos' traits, e.g., marketing logic, persuasive strategies, and audience engagement. Our contribution is three-fold: (1) To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use ad videos with well-designed tasks to evaluate LLMs. We contribute AdsQA, a challenging ad Video QA benchmark derived from 1,544 ad videos with 10,962 clips, totaling 22.7 hours, providing 5 challenging tasks. (2) We propose ReAd-R, a Deepseek-R1 styled RL model that reflects on questions, and generates answers via reward-driven optimization. (3) We benchmark 14 top-tier LLMs on AdsQA, and our \texttt{ReAd-R}~achieves the state-of-the-art outperforming strong competitors equipped with long-chain reasoning capabilities by a clear margin.

Zhiwen Ruan, Yun Chen, Yutao Hou et al.

The pretrained large language models (LLMs) are finetuned with labeled data for better instruction following ability and alignment with human values. In this paper, we study the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning on reasoning tasks and reveal the uncovered over-memorization phenomenon during a specific stage of LLM finetuning. At this stage, the LLMs have excessively memorized training data and exhibit high test perplexity while maintaining good test accuracy. We explore the conditions that contribute to over-memorization and discover that this issue is prevalent across various tasks, models, and fine-tuning methods, with prolonged training and large learning rates exacerbating the problem. Although models with over-memorization demonstrate comparable test accuracy to normal models, they suffer from reduced robustness, poor out-of-distribution generalization, and decreased generation diversity. In light of our findings on over-memorization, we offer recommendations for checkpoint selection and propose techniques such as checkpoint merging and memorization-aware reweighting to mitigate this effect.

Yang Liu, Xingming Zhang, Yante Li et al.

As one of the most important affective signals, facial affect analysis (FAA) is essential for developing human-computer interaction systems. Early methods focus on extracting appearance and geometry features associated with human affects while ignoring the latent semantic information among individual facial changes, leading to limited performance and generalization. Recent work attempts to establish a graph-based representation to model these semantic relationships and develop frameworks to leverage them for various FAA tasks. This paper provides a comprehensive review of graph-based FAA, including the evolution of algorithms and their applications. First, the FAA background knowledge is introduced, especially on the role of the graph. We then discuss approaches widely used for graph-based affective representation in literature and show a trend towards graph construction. For the relational reasoning in graph-based FAA, existing studies are categorized according to their non-deep or deep learning methods, emphasizing the latest graph neural networks. Performance comparisons of the state-of-the-art graph-based FAA methods are also summarized. Finally, we discuss the challenges and potential directions. As far as we know, this is the first survey of graph-based FAA methods. Our findings can serve as a reference for future research in this field.

Yang Liu, Tom Gedeon, Sabrina Caldwell et al.

Emotion recognition based on physiological signals is a hot topic and has a wide range of applications, like safe driving, health care and creating a secure society. This paper introduces a physiological dataset PAFEW, which is obtained using movie clips from the Acted Facial Expressions in the Wild (AFEW) dataset as stimuli. To establish a baseline, we use the electrodermal activity (EDA) signals in this dataset and extract 6 features from each signal series corresponding to each movie clip to recognize 7 emotions, i.e., Anger, Disgust, Fear, Happy, Surprise, Sad and Neutral. Overall, 24 observers participated in our collection of the training set, including 19 observers who participated in only one session watching 80 videos from 7 classes and 5 observers who participated multiple times and watched all the videos. All videos were presented in an order balanced fashion. Leave-one-observer-out was employed in this classification task. We report the classification accuracy of our baseline, a three-layer network, on this initial training set while training with signals from all participants, only single participants and only multiple participants. We also investigate the recognition accuracy of grouping the dataset by arousal or valence, which achieves 68.66% and 72.72% separately. Finally, we provide a two-step network. The first step is to classify the features into high/low arousal or positive/negative valence by a network. Then the arousal/valence middle output of the first step is concatenated with feature sets as input of the second step for emotion recognition. We found that adding arousal or valence information can help to improve the classification accuracy. In addition, the information of positive/negative valence boosts the classification accuracy to a higher degree on this dataset.