Progressive Neural Networks for Transfer Learning in Emotion Recognition
This work addresses improving emotion recognition systems for applications in human-computer interaction, but it is incremental as it builds on existing transfer learning methods.
The paper tackled the problem of transferring knowledge between paralinguistic tasks like speaker, emotion, and gender recognition, and across datasets, showing that emotion recognition benefits from using representations learned for other tasks and that transfer learning improves performance.
Many paralinguistic tasks are closely related and thus representations learned in one domain can be leveraged for another. In this paper, we investigate how knowledge can be transferred between three paralinguistic tasks: speaker, emotion, and gender recognition. Further, we extend this problem to cross-dataset tasks, asking how knowledge captured in one emotion dataset can be transferred to another. We focus on progressive neural networks and compare these networks to the conventional deep learning method of pre-training and fine-tuning. Progressive neural networks provide a way to transfer knowledge and avoid the forgetting effect present when pre-training neural networks on different tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that: (1) emotion recognition can benefit from using representations originally learned for different paralinguistic tasks and (2) transfer learning can effectively leverage additional datasets to improve the performance of emotion recognition systems.