Bjorn W. Schuller

Jonah Anton, Harry Coppock, Pancham Shukla et al.

The Barlow Twins self-supervised learning objective requires neither negative samples or asymmetric learning updates, achieving results on a par with the current state-of-the-art within Computer Vision. As such, we present Audio Barlow Twins, a novel self-supervised audio representation learning approach, adapting Barlow Twins to the audio domain. We pre-train on the large-scale audio dataset AudioSet, and evaluate the quality of the learnt representations on 18 tasks from the HEAR 2021 Challenge, achieving results which outperform, or otherwise are on a par with, the current state-of-the-art for instance discrimination self-supervised learning approaches to audio representation learning. Code at https://github.com/jonahanton/SSL_audio.

Zixing Zhang, Liyizhe Peng, Tao Pang et al.

After the inception of emotion recognition or affective computing, it has increasingly become an active research topic due to its broad applications. Over the past couple of decades, emotion recognition models have gradually migrated from statistically shallow models to neural network-based deep models, which can significantly boost the performance of emotion recognition models and consistently achieve the best results on different benchmarks. Therefore, in recent years, deep models have always been considered the first option for emotion recognition. However, the debut of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has remarkably astonished the world due to their emerged capabilities of zero/few-shot learning, in-context learning, chain-of-thought, and others that are never shown in previous deep models. In the present paper, we comprehensively investigate how the LLMs perform in emotion recognition in terms of diverse aspects, including in-context learning, few-short learning, accuracy, generalisation, and explanation. Moreover, we offer some insights and pose other potential challenges, hoping to ignite broader discussions about enhancing emotion recognition in the new era of advanced and generalised large models.

Thejan Rajapakshe, Rajib Rana, Sara Khalifa et al.

Computers can understand and then engage with people in an emotionally intelligent way thanks to speech-emotion recognition (SER). However, the performance of SER in cross-corpus and real-world live data feed scenarios can be significantly improved. The inability to adapt an existing model to a new domain is one of the shortcomings of SER methods. To address this challenge, researchers have developed domain adaptation techniques that transfer knowledge learnt by a model across the domain. Although existing domain adaptation techniques have improved performances across domains, they can be improved to adapt to a real-world live data feed situation where a model can self-tune while deployed. In this paper, we present a deep reinforcement learning-based strategy (RL-DA) for adapting a pre-trained model to a real-world live data feed setting while interacting with the environment and collecting continual feedback. RL-DA is evaluated on SER tasks, including cross-corpus and cross-language domain adaption schema. Evaluation results show that in a live data feed setting, RL-DA outperforms a baseline strategy by 11% and 14% in cross-corpus and cross-language scenarios, respectively.

Panagiotis Tzirakis, Stefanos Zafeiriou, Bjorn W. Schuller

We introduce End2You -- the Imperial College London toolkit for multimodal profiling by end-to-end deep learning. End2You is an open-source toolkit implemented in Python and is based on Tensorflow. It provides capabilities to train and evaluate models in an end-to-end manner, i.e., using raw input. It supports input from raw audio, visual, physiological or other types of information or combination of those, and the output can be of an arbitrary representation, for either classification or regression tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first toolkit that provides generic end-to-end learning for profiling capabilities in either unimodal or multimodal cases. To test our toolkit, we utilise the RECOLA database as was used in the AVEC 2016 challenge. Experimental results indicate that End2You can provide comparable results to state-of-the-art methods despite no need of expert-alike feature representations, but self-learning these from the data "end to end".

Zheng Lian, Xiaojiang Peng, Kele Xu et al.

MER2026 marks the fourth edition of the MER series of challenges. The MER series provides valuable data resources to the research community and offers tasks centered on recent research trends, establishing itself as one of the largest challenges in the field. Throughout its history, the focus of MER has shifted from discriminative emotion recognition to generative emotion understanding. Specifically, MER2023 concentrated on discriminative emotion recognition, restricting the emotion recognition scope to fixed basic labels. In MER2024 and MER2025, we transitioned to generative emotion understanding and introduced two new tasks: fine-grained emotion recognition and descriptive emotion analysis, aiming to leverage the extensive vocabulary and multimodal understanding capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to facilitate fine-grained and explainable emotion recognition. Building on this trajectory, MER2026 continues to follow these research trends and contains four tracks: MER-Cross shifts the focus from individual to dyadic interaction scenarios; MER-FG centers on fine-grained emotion recognition; MER-Prefer aims to predict human preferences regarding different emotion descriptions; MER-PS focuses on emotion recognition based on physiological signals. More details regarding the dataset and baselines are available at https://zeroqiaoba.github.io/MER-Challenge.

Rong Gao, Xin Liu, Bohao Xing et al.

In this work, we focus on a special group of human body language -- the micro-gesture (MG), which differs from the range of ordinary illustrative gestures in that they are not intentional behaviors performed to convey information to others, but rather unintentional behaviors driven by inner feelings. This characteristic introduces two novel challenges regarding micro-gestures that are worth rethinking. The first is whether strategies designed for other action recognition are entirely applicable to micro-gestures. The second is whether micro-gestures, as supplementary data, can provide additional insights for emotional understanding. In recognizing micro-gestures, we explored various augmentation strategies that take into account the subtle spatial and brief temporal characteristics of micro-gestures, often accompanied by repetitiveness, to determine more suitable augmentation methods. Considering the significance of temporal domain information for micro-gestures, we introduce a simple and efficient plug-and-play spatiotemporal balancing fusion method. We not only studied our method on the considered micro-gesture dataset but also conducted experiments on mainstream action datasets. The results show that our approach performs well in micro-gesture recognition and on other datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance compared to previous micro-gesture recognition methods. For emotional understanding based on micro-gestures, we construct complex emotional reasoning scenarios. Our evaluation, conducted with large language models, shows that micro-gestures play a significant and positive role in enhancing comprehensive emotional understanding. The scenarios we developed can be extended to other micro-gesture-based tasks such as deception detection and interviews. We confirm that our new insights contribute to advancing research in micro-gesture and emotional artificial intelligence.

Thejan Rajapakshe, Rajib Rana, Sara Khalifa et al.

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is crucial for enabling computers to understand the emotions conveyed in human communication. With recent advancements in Deep Learning (DL), the performance of SER models has significantly improved. However, designing an optimal DL architecture requires specialised knowledge and experimental assessments. Fortunately, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) provides a potential solution for automatically determining the best DL model. The Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) is a particularly efficient method for discovering optimal models. This study presents emoDARTS, a DARTS-optimised joint CNN and Sequential Neural Network (SeqNN: LSTM, RNN) architecture that enhances SER performance. The literature supports the selection of CNN and LSTM coupling to improve performance. While DARTS has previously been used to choose CNN and LSTM operations independently, our technique adds a novel mechanism for selecting CNN and SeqNN operations in conjunction using DARTS. Unlike earlier work, we do not impose limits on the layer order of the CNN. Instead, we let DARTS choose the best layer order inside the DARTS cell. We demonstrate that emoDARTS outperforms conventionally designed CNN-LSTM models and surpasses the best-reported SER results achieved through DARTS on CNN-LSTM by evaluating our approach on the IEMOCAP, MSP-IMPROV, and MSP-Podcast datasets.

Kazi Nazmul Haque, Rajib Rana, Tasnim Jarin et al.

This study explores the field of audio classification from raw waveform using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a method that eliminates the need for extracting specialised features in the pre-processing step. Unlike recent trends in literature, which often focuses on designing frontends or filters for only the initial layers of CNNs, our research introduces the Cosine Convolutional Neural Network (CosCovNN) replacing the traditional CNN filters with Cosine filters. The CosCovNN surpasses the accuracy of the equivalent CNN architectures with approximately $77\%$ less parameters. Our research further progresses with the development of an augmented CosCovNN named Vector Quantised Cosine Convolutional Neural Network with Memory (VQCCM), incorporating a memory and vector quantisation layer VQCCM achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across five different datasets in comparison with existing literature. Our findings show that cosine filters can greatly improve the efficiency and accuracy of CNNs in raw audio classification.

Lukas Stappen, Manuel Milling, Valentin Munst et al.

Professional athletes increasingly use automated analysis of meta- and signal data to improve their training and game performance. As in other related human-to-human research fields, signal data, in particular, contain important performance- and mood-specific indicators for automated analysis. In this paper, we introduce the novel data set SCORE! to investigate the performance of several features and machine learning paradigms in the prediction of the sex and immediate stroke success in tennis matches, based only on vocal expression through players' grunts. The data was gathered from YouTube, labelled under the exact same definition, and the audio processed for modelling. We extract several widely used basic, expert-knowledge, and deep acoustic features of the audio samples and evaluate their effectiveness in combination with various machine learning approaches. In a binary setting, the best system, using spectrograms and a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network, achieves an unweighted average recall (UAR) of 84.0 % for the player sex prediction task, and 60.3 % predicting stroke success, based only on acoustic cues in players' grunts of both sexes. Further, we achieve a UAR of 58.3 %, and 61.3 %, when the models are exclusively trained on female or male grunts, respectively.

Kun Qian, Bjorn W. Schuller, Yoshiharu Yamamoto

Computer audition (CA) has been demonstrated to be efficient in healthcare domains for speech-affecting disorders (e.g., autism spectrum, depression, or Parkinson's disease) and body sound-affecting abnormalities (e. g., abnormal bowel sounds, heart murmurs, or snore sounds). Nevertheless, CA has been underestimated in the considered data-driven technologies for fighting the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. In this light, summarise the most recent advances in CA for COVID-19 speech and/or sound analysis. While the milestones achieved are encouraging, there are yet not any solid conclusions that can be made. This comes mostly, as data is still sparse, often not sufficiently validated and lacking in systematic comparison with related diseases that affect the respiratory system. In particular, CA-based methods cannot be a standalone screening tool for SARS-CoV-2. We hope this brief overview can provide a good guidance and attract more attention from a broader artificial intelligence community.

Zhengxin Joseph Ye, Bjorn W. Schuller

While Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift (PEAD) is one of the most studied stock market anomalies, the current literature is often limited in explaining this phenomenon by a small number of factors using simpler regression methods. In this paper, we use a machine learning based approach instead, and aim to capture the PEAD dynamics using data from a large group of stocks and a wide range of both fundamental and technical factors. Our model is built around the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and uses a long list of engineered input features based on quarterly financial announcement data from 1,106 companies in the Russell 1000 index between 1997 and 2018. We perform numerous experiments on PEAD predictions and analysis and have the following contributions to the literature. First, we show how Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift can be analysed using machine learning methods and demonstrate such methods' prowess in producing credible forecasting on the drift direction. It is the first time PEAD dynamics are studied using XGBoost. We show that the drift direction is in fact driven by different factors for stocks from different industrial sectors and in different quarters and XGBoost is effective in understanding the changing drivers. Second, we show that an XGBoost well optimised by a Genetic Algorithm can help allocate out-of-sample stocks to form portfolios with higher positive returns to long and portfolios with lower negative returns to short, a finding that could be adopted in the process of developing market neutral strategies. Third, we show how theoretical event-driven stock strategies have to grapple with ever changing market prices in reality, reducing their effectiveness. We present a tactic to remedy the difficulty of buying into a moving market when dealing with PEAD signals.