SS-MFAR : Semi-supervised Multi-task Facial Affect Recognition
This work addresses the challenge of real-world affect recognition for applications in education, gaming, and healthcare, but it is incremental as it builds on existing semi-supervised and multi-task learning approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of incomplete labels in in-the-wild facial affect recognition by proposing a semi-supervised multi-task method, achieving competitive performance in the ABAW 2022 competition across valence-arousal estimation, expression classification, and action unit detection tasks.
Automatic affect recognition has applications in many areas such as education, gaming, software development, automotives, medical care, etc. but it is non trivial task to achieve appreciable performance on in-the-wild data sets. In-the-wild data sets though represent real-world scenarios better than synthetic data sets, the former ones suffer from the problem of incomplete labels. Inspired by semi-supervised learning, in this paper, we introduce our submission to the Multi-Task-Learning Challenge at the 4th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) 2022 Competition. The three tasks that are considered in this challenge are valence-arousal(VA) estimation, classification of expressions into 6 basic (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise), neutral, and the 'other' category and 12 action units(AU) numbered AU-{1,2,4,6,7,10,12,15,23,24,25,26}. Our method Semi-supervised Multi-task Facial Affect Recognition titled SS-MFAR uses a deep residual network with task specific classifiers for each of the tasks along with adaptive thresholds for each expression class and semi-supervised learning for the incomplete labels. Source code is available at https://github.com/1980x/ABAW2022DMACS.