Context De-confounded Emotion RecognitionDingkang Yang, Zhaoyu Chen, Yuzheng Wang et al.
Context-Aware Emotion Recognition (CAER) is a crucial and challenging task that aims to perceive the emotional states of the target person with contextual information. Recent approaches invariably focus on designing sophisticated architectures or mechanisms to extract seemingly meaningful representations from subjects and contexts. However, a long-overlooked issue is that a context bias in existing datasets leads to a significantly unbalanced distribution of emotional states among different context scenarios. Concretely, the harmful bias is a confounder that misleads existing models to learn spurious correlations based on conventional likelihood estimation, significantly limiting the models' performance. To tackle the issue, this paper provides a causality-based perspective to disentangle the models from the impact of such bias, and formulate the causalities among variables in the CAER task via a tailored causal graph. Then, we propose a Contextual Causal Intervention Module (CCIM) based on the backdoor adjustment to de-confound the confounder and exploit the true causal effect for model training. CCIM is plug-in and model-agnostic, which improves diverse state-of-the-art approaches by considerable margins. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our CCIM and the significance of causal insight.
14.7CVJul 6, 2024
Towards Context-Aware Emotion Recognition Debiasing from a Causal Demystification Perspective via De-confounded TrainingDingkang Yang, Kun Yang, Haopeng Kuang et al.
Understanding emotions from diverse contexts has received widespread attention in computer vision communities. The core philosophy of Context-Aware Emotion Recognition (CAER) is to provide valuable semantic cues for recognizing the emotions of target persons by leveraging rich contextual information. Current approaches invariably focus on designing sophisticated structures to extract perceptually critical representations from contexts. Nevertheless, a long-neglected dilemma is that a severe context bias in existing datasets results in an unbalanced distribution of emotional states among different contexts, causing biased visual representation learning. From a causal demystification perspective, the harmful bias is identified as a confounder that misleads existing models to learn spurious correlations based on likelihood estimation, limiting the models' performance. To address the issue, we embrace causal inference to disentangle the models from the impact of such bias, and formulate the causalities among variables in the CAER task via a customized causal graph. Subsequently, we present a Contextual Causal Intervention Module (CCIM) to de-confound the confounder, which is built upon backdoor adjustment theory to facilitate seeking approximate causal effects during model training. As a plug-and-play component, CCIM can easily integrate with existing approaches and bring significant improvements. Systematic experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our CCIM.
17.5CVJul 5
Wan-Streamer v0.2: Higher Resolution, Same LatencyLianghua Huang, Zhi-Fan Wu, Yupeng Shi et al.
We present Wan-Streamer v0.2, a latency-preserving upgrade of the native-streaming, end-to-end audio-visual interaction model. v0.2 keeps the v0.1 modeling formulation, but raises the interactive output stream from 192x336 to 640x368 while preserving approximately 200 ms model-side signal-to-signal latency at 25 FPS. The higher-resolution stream supports scene-grounded mid-shot agents whose posture, gaze, hands, nearby objects, and local scene layout remain legible during real-time conversation. To support the larger visual stream without adding user-visible delay, v0.2 keeps the thinker as a single-GPU low-latency path for streaming perception, the short language/state Transformer pass that builds the generation cache, and final decoding. The performer becomes a multi-GPU Ulysses-style context-parallel group for the expensive next-unit latent generation. Each performer rank writes incoming K/V into a pre-sharded local cache. The long high-resolution latent video sequence is split across ranks for denoising and gathered through Ulysses communication, while the much shorter audio latent sequence is generated without sequence sharding. In this split, the thinker's language/state computation reaches the performer only as K/V conditioning, so no separate language sequence has to be communicated inside the performer group. This concentrates additional hardware on visual generation while preserving the compact thinker-performer boundary, keeping total remote interaction latency at approximately 550 ms when a 350 ms bidirectional network budget is included.