Wenming Zheng

Yang Li, Ji Chen, Fu Li et al.

Previous electroencephalogram (EEG) emotion recognition relies on single-task learning, which may lead to overfitting and learned emotion features lacking generalization. In this paper, a graph-based multi-task self-supervised learning model (GMSS) for EEG emotion recognition is proposed. GMSS has the ability to learn more general representations by integrating multiple self-supervised tasks, including spatial and frequency jigsaw puzzle tasks, and contrastive learning tasks. By learning from multiple tasks simultaneously, GMSS can find a representation that captures all of the tasks thereby decreasing the chance of overfitting on the original task, i.e., emotion recognition task. In particular, the spatial jigsaw puzzle task aims to capture the intrinsic spatial relationships of different brain regions. Considering the importance of frequency information in EEG emotional signals, the goal of the frequency jigsaw puzzle task is to explore the crucial frequency bands for EEG emotion recognition. To further regularize the learned features and encourage the network to learn inherent representations, contrastive learning task is adopted in this work by mapping the transformed data into a common feature space. The performance of the proposed GMSS is compared with several popular unsupervised and supervised methods. Experiments on SEED, SEED-IV, and MPED datasets show that the proposed model has remarkable advantages in learning more discriminative and general features for EEG emotional signals.

Cheng Lu, Wenming Zheng, Hailun Lian et al.

Spectrogram is commonly used as the input feature of deep neural networks to learn the high(er)-level time-frequency pattern of speech signal for speech emotion recognition (SER). \textcolor{black}{Generally, different emotions correspond to specific energy activations both within frequency bands and time frames on spectrogram, which indicates the frequency and time domains are both essential to represent the emotion for SER. However, recent spectrogram-based works mainly focus on modeling the long-term dependency in time domain, leading to these methods encountering the following two issues: (1) neglecting to model the emotion-related correlations within frequency domain during the time-frequency joint learning; (2) ignoring to capture the specific frequency bands associated with emotions.} To cope with the issues, we propose an attentive time-frequency neural network (ATFNN) for SER, including a time-frequency neural network (TFNN) and time-frequency attention. Specifically, aiming at the first issue, we design a TFNN with a frequency-domain encoder (F-Encoder) based on the Transformer encoder and a time-domain encoder (T-Encoder) based on the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM). The F-Encoder and T-Encoder model the correlations within frequency bands and time frames, respectively, and they are embedded into a time-frequency joint learning strategy to obtain the time-frequency patterns for speech emotions. Moreover, to handle the second issue, we also adopt time-frequency attention with a frequency-attention network (F-Attention) and a time-attention network (T-Attention) to focus on the emotion-related frequency band ranges and time frame ranges, which can enhance the discriminability of speech emotion features.

Yan Zhao, Jincen Wang, Yuan Zong et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel deep transfer learning method called deep implicit distribution alignment networks (DIDAN) to deal with cross-corpus speech emotion recognition (SER) problem, in which the labeled training (source) and unlabeled testing (target) speech signals come from different corpora. Specifically, DIDAN first adopts a simple deep regression network consisting of a set of convolutional and fully connected layers to directly regress the source speech spectrums into the emotional labels such that the proposed DIDAN can own the emotion discriminative ability. Then, such ability is transferred to be also applicable to the target speech samples regardless of corpus variance by resorting to a well-designed regularization term called implicit distribution alignment (IDA). Unlike widely-used maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and its variants, the proposed IDA absorbs the idea of sample reconstruction to implicitly align the distribution gap, which enables DIDAN to learn both emotion discriminative and corpus invariant features from speech spectrums. To evaluate the proposed DIDAN, extensive cross-corpus SER experiments on widely-used speech emotion corpora are carried out. Experimental results show that the proposed DIDAN can outperform lots of recent state-of-the-art methods in coping with the cross-corpus SER tasks.

Jie Zhu, Yuan Zong, Jingang Shi et al.

This paper focuses on the research of micro-expression recognition (MER) and proposes a flexible and reliable deep learning method called learning to rank onset-occurring-offset representations (LTR3O). The LTR3O method introduces a dynamic and reduced-size sequence structure known as 3O, which consists of onset, occurring, and offset frames, for representing micro-expressions (MEs). This structure facilitates the subsequent learning of ME-discriminative features. A noteworthy advantage of the 3O structure is its flexibility, as the occurring frame is randomly extracted from the original ME sequence without the need for accurate frame spotting methods. Based on the 3O structures, LTR3O generates multiple 3O representation candidates for each ME sample and incorporates well-designed modules to measure and calibrate their emotional expressiveness. This calibration process ensures that the distribution of these candidates aligns with that of macro-expressions (MaMs) over time. Consequently, the visibility of MEs can be implicitly enhanced, facilitating the reliable learning of more discriminative features for MER. Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of LTR3O using three widely-used ME databases: CASME II, SMIC, and SAMM. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of LTR3O, particularly in terms of its flexibility and reliability, when compared to recent state-of-the-art MER methods.

Xiaolin Xu, Yuan Zong, Wenming Zheng et al.

In this paper, we present a large-scale, multi-source, and unconstrained database called SDFE-LV for spotting the onset and offset frames of a complete dynamic facial expression from long videos, which is known as the topic of dynamic facial expression spotting (DFES) and a vital prior step for lots of facial expression analysis tasks. Specifically, SDFE-LV consists of 1,191 long videos, each of which contains one or more complete dynamic facial expressions. Moreover, each complete dynamic facial expression in its corresponding long video was independently labeled for five times by 10 well-trained annotators. To the best of our knowledge, SDFE-LV is the first unconstrained large-scale database for the DFES task whose long videos are collected from multiple real-world/closely real-world media sources, e.g., TV interviews, documentaries, movies, and we-media short videos. Therefore, DFES tasks on SDFE-LV database will encounter numerous difficulties in practice such as head posture changes, occlusions, and illumination. We also provided a comprehensive benchmark evaluation from different angles by using lots of recent state-of-the-art deep spotting methods and hence researchers interested in DFES can quickly and easily get started. Finally, with the deep discussions on the experimental evaluation results, we attempt to point out several meaningful directions to deal with DFES tasks and hope that DFES can be better advanced in the future. In addition, SDFE-LV will be freely released for academic use only as soon as possible.

Yiye Wang, Wenming Zheng, Yang Li et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are becoming increasingly popular for EEG-based depression detection. However, previous GNN-based methods fail to sufficiently consider the characteristics of depression, thus limiting their performance. Firstly, studies in neuroscience indicate that depression patients exhibit both common and individualized brain abnormal patterns. Previous GNN-based approaches typically focus either on fixed graph connections to capture common abnormal brain patterns or on adaptive connections to capture individualized patterns, which is inadequate for depression detection. Secondly, brain network exhibits a hierarchical structure, which includes the arrangement from channel-level graph to region-level graph. This hierarchical structure varies among individuals and contains significant information relevant to detecting depression. Nonetheless, previous GNN-based methods overlook these individualized hierarchical information. To address these issues, we propose a Hybrid GNN (HGNN) that merges a Common Graph Neural Network (CGNN) branch utilizing fixed connection and an Individualized Graph Neural Network (IGNN) branch employing adaptive connections. The two branches capture common and individualized depression patterns respectively, complementing each other. Furthermore, we enhance the IGNN branch with a Graph Pooling and Unpooling Module (GPUM) to extract individualized hierarchical information. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Yijin Zhou, Fu Li, Yang Li et al.

Studies in the area of neuroscience have revealed the relationship between emotional patterns and brain functional regions, demonstrating that dynamic relationships between different brain regions are an essential factor affecting emotion recognition determined through electroencephalography (EEG). Moreover, in EEG emotion recognition, we can observe that clearer boundaries exist between coarse-grained emotions than those between fine-grained emotions, based on the same EEG data; this indicates the concurrence of large coarse- and small fine-grained emotion variations. Thus, the progressive classification process from coarse- to fine-grained categories may be helpful for EEG emotion recognition. Consequently, in this study, we propose a progressive graph convolution network (PGCN) for capturing this inherent characteristic in EEG emotional signals and progressively learning the discriminative EEG features. To fit different EEG patterns, we constructed a dual-graph module to characterize the intrinsic relationship between different EEG channels, containing the dynamic functional connections and static spatial proximity information of brain regions from neuroscience research. Moreover, motivated by the observation of the relationship between coarse- and fine-grained emotions, we adopt a dual-head module that enables the PGCN to progressively learn more discriminative EEG features, from coarse-grained (easy) to fine-grained categories (difficult), referring to the hierarchical characteristic of emotion. To verify the performance of our model, extensive experiments were conducted on two public datasets: SEED-IV and multi-modal physiological emotion database (MPED).