CHUCKLE -- When Humans Teach AI To Learn Emotions The Easy Way

Curriculum learning (CL) structures training from simple to complex samples, facilitating progressive learning. However, existing CL approaches for emotion recognition often rely on heuristic, data-driven, or model-based definitions of sample difficulty, neglecting the difficulty for human perception, a critical factor in subjective tasks like emotion recognition. We propose CHUCKLE (Crowdsourced Human Understanding Curriculum for Knowledge Led Emotion Recognition), a perception-driven CL framework that leverages annotator agreement and alignment in crowd-sourced datasets to define sample difficulty, under the assumption that clips challenging for humans are similarly hard for machine learning models. Empirical results suggest that CHUCKLE increases the relative mean accuracy by 6.56% for LSTMs and 1.61% for Transformers over non-curriculum baselines, while reducing the number of gradient updates, thereby enhancing both training efficiency and model robustness.

Scene Summarization: Clustering Scene Videos into Spatially Diverse Frames

We propose scene summarization as a new video-based scene understanding task. It aims to summarize a long video walkthrough of a scene into a small set of frames that are spatially diverse in the scene, which has many impotant applications, such as in surveillance, real estate, and robotics. It stems from video summarization but focuses on long and continuous videos from moving cameras, instead of user-edited fragmented video clips that are more commonly studied in existing video summarization works. Our solution to this task is a two-stage self-supervised pipeline named SceneSum. Its first stage uses clustering to segment the video sequence. Our key idea is to combine visual place recognition (VPR) into this clustering process to promote spatial diversity. Its second stage needs to select a representative keyframe from each cluster as the summary while respecting resource constraints such as memory and disk space limits. Additionally, if the ground truth image trajectory is available, our method can be easily augmented with a supervised loss to enhance the clustering and keyframe selection. Extensive experiments on both real-world and simulated datasets show our method outperforms common video summarization baselines by 50%