Explainable Multimodal Emotion Reasoning

Multimodal emotion recognition is an active research topic in artificial intelligence. Its primary objective is to integrate multi-modalities (such as acoustic, visual, and lexical clues) to identify human emotional states. Current works generally assume accurate emotion labels for benchmark datasets and focus on developing more effective architectures. But due to the inherent subjectivity of emotions, existing datasets often lack high annotation consistency, resulting in potentially inaccurate labels. Consequently, models built on these datasets may struggle to meet the demands of practical applications. To address this issue, it is crucial to enhance the reliability of emotion annotations. In this paper, we propose a novel task called ``\textbf{Explainable Multimodal Emotion Reasoning (EMER)}''. In contrast to previous works that primarily focus on predicting emotions, EMER takes a step further by providing explanations for these predictions. The prediction is considered correct as long as the reasoning process behind the predicted emotion is plausible. This paper presents our initial efforts on EMER, where we introduce a benchmark dataset, establish baseline models, and define evaluation metrics. Meanwhile, we observe the necessity of integrating multi-faceted capabilities to deal with EMER. Therefore, we propose the first multimodal large language model (LLM) in affective computing, called \textbf{AffectGPT}. We aim to tackle the long-standing challenge of label ambiguity and chart a path toward more reliable techniques. Furthermore, EMER offers an opportunity to evaluate the audio-video-text understanding capabilities of recent multimodal LLM. To facilitate further research, we make the code and data available at: https://github.com/zeroQiaoba/AffectGPT

MER 2023: Multi-label Learning, Modality Robustness, and Semi-Supervised Learning

Over the past few decades, multimodal emotion recognition has made remarkable progress with the development of deep learning. However, existing technologies are difficult to meet the demand for practical applications. To improve the robustness, we launch a Multimodal Emotion Recognition Challenge (MER 2023) to motivate global researchers to build innovative technologies that can further accelerate and foster research. For this year's challenge, we present three distinct sub-challenges: (1) MER-MULTI, in which participants recognize both discrete and dimensional emotions; (2) MER-NOISE, in which noise is added to test videos for modality robustness evaluation; (3) MER-SEMI, which provides large amounts of unlabeled samples for semi-supervised learning. In this paper, we test a variety of multimodal features and provide a competitive baseline for each sub-challenge. Our system achieves 77.57% on the F1 score and 0.82 on the mean squared error (MSE) for MER-MULTI, 69.82% on the F1 score and 1.12 on MSE for MER-NOISE, and 86.75% on the F1 score for MER-SEMI, respectively. Baseline code is available at https://github.com/zeroQiaoba/MER2023-Baseline

Facial Expression Analysis under Partial Occlusion: A Survey

Automatic machine-based Facial Expression Analysis (FEA) has made substantial progress in the past few decades driven by its importance for applications in psychology, security, health, entertainment and human computer interaction. The vast majority of completed FEA studies are based on non-occluded faces collected in a controlled laboratory environment. Automatic expression recognition tolerant to partial occlusion remains less understood, particularly in real-world scenarios. In recent years, efforts investigating techniques to handle partial occlusion for FEA have seen an increase. The context is right for a comprehensive perspective of these developments and the state of the art from this perspective. This survey provides such a comprehensive review of recent advances in dataset creation, algorithm development, and investigations of the effects of occlusion critical for robust performance in FEA systems. It outlines existing challenges in overcoming partial occlusion and discusses possible opportunities in advancing the technology. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first FEA survey dedicated to occlusion and aimed at promoting better informed and benchmarked future work.Comment: Authors pre-print of the article accepted for publication in ACM Computing Surveys (accepted on 02-Nov-2017