Affective Behaviour Analysis via Progressive Learning

Affective Behavior Analysis aims to develop emotionally intelligent technology that can recognize and respond to human emotions. To advance this, the 7th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition establishes two tracks: i.e., the Multi-task Learning (MTL) Challenge and the Compound Expression (CE) challenge based on Aff-Wild2 and C-EXPR-DB datasets. In this paper, we present our methods and experimental results for the two competition tracks. Specifically, it can be summarized in the following four aspects: 1) To attain high-quality facial features, we train a Masked-Auto Encoder in a self-supervised manner. 2) We devise a temporal convergence module to capture the temporal information between video frames and explore the impact of window size and sequence length on each sub-task. 3) To facilitate the joint optimization of various sub-tasks, we explore the impact of sub-task joint training and feature fusion from individual tasks on each task performance improvement. 4) We utilize curriculum learning to transition the model from recognizing single expressions to recognizing compound expressions, thereby improving the accuracy of compound expression recognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our designs.

ECNet: Effective Controllable Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

The conditional text-to-image diffusion models have garnered significant attention in recent years. However, the precision of these models is often compromised mainly for two reasons, ambiguous condition input and inadequate condition guidance over single denoising loss. To address the challenges, we introduce two innovative solutions. Firstly, we propose a Spatial Guidance Injector (SGI) which enhances conditional detail by encoding text inputs with precise annotation information. This method directly tackles the issue of ambiguous control inputs by providing clear, annotated guidance to the model. Secondly, to overcome the issue of limited conditional supervision, we introduce Diffusion Consistency Loss (DCL), which applies supervision on the denoised latent code at any given time step. This encourages consistency between the latent code at each time step and the input signal, thereby enhancing the robustness and accuracy of the output. The combination of SGI and DCL results in our Effective Controllable Network (ECNet), which offers a more accurate controllable end-to-end text-to-image generation framework with a more precise conditioning input and stronger controllable supervision. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on generation under various conditions, such as human body skeletons, facial landmarks, and sketches of general objects. The results consistently demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the controllability and robustness of the generated images, outperforming existing state-of-the-art controllable text-to-image models.

Affective Behaviour Analysis via Integrating Multi-Modal Knowledge

Affective Behavior Analysis aims to facilitate technology emotionally smart, creating a world where devices can understand and react to our emotions as humans do. To comprehensively evaluate the authenticity and applicability of emotional behavior analysis techniques in natural environments, the 6th competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) utilizes the Aff-Wild2, Hume-Vidmimic2, and C-EXPR-DB datasets to set up five competitive tracks, i.e., Valence-Arousal (VA) Estimation, Expression (EXPR) Recognition, Action Unit (AU) Detection, Compound Expression (CE) Recognition, and Emotional Mimicry Intensity (EMI) Estimation. In this paper, we present our method designs for the five tasks. Specifically, our design mainly includes three aspects: 1) Utilizing a transformer-based feature fusion module to fully integrate emotional information provided by audio signals, visual images, and transcripts, offering high-quality expression features for the downstream tasks. 2) To achieve high-quality facial feature representations, we employ Masked-Auto Encoder as the visual features extraction model and fine-tune it with our facial dataset. 3) Considering the complexity of the video collection scenes, we conduct a more detailed dataset division based on scene characteristics and train the classifier for each scene. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our designs.

Federated Battery Diagnosis and Prognosis

Battery diagnosis, prognosis and health management models play a critical role in the integration of battery systems in energy and mobility fields. However, large-scale deployment of these models is hindered by a myriad of challenges centered around data ownership, privacy, communication, and processing. State-of-the-art battery diagnosis and prognosis methods require centralized collection of data, which further aggravates these challenges. Here we propose a federated battery prognosis model, which distributes the processing of battery standard current-voltage-time-usage data in a privacy-preserving manner. Instead of exchanging raw standard current-voltage-time-usage data, our model communicates only the model parameters, thus reducing communication load and preserving data confidentiality. The proposed model offers a paradigm shift in battery health management through privacy-preserving distributed methods for battery data processing and remaining lifetime prediction.

Detecting Electricity Service Equity Issues with Transfer Counterfactual Learning on Large-Scale Outage Datasets

Energy justice is a growing area of interest in interdisciplinary energy research. However, identifying systematic biases in the energy sector remains challenging due to confounding variables, intricate heterogeneity in treatment effects, and limited data availability. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach for counterfactual causal analysis centered on energy justice. We use subgroup analysis to manage diverse factors and leverage the idea of transfer learning to mitigate data scarcity in each subgroup. In our numerical analysis, we apply our method to a large-scale customer-level power outage data set and investigate the counterfactual effect of demographic factors, such as income and age of the population, on power outage durations. Our results indicate that low-income and elderly-populated areas consistently experience longer power outages, regardless of weather conditions. This points to existing biases in the power system and highlights the need for focused improvements in areas with economic challenges.

Facial Affective Analysis based on MAE and Multi-modal Information for 5th ABAW Competition

Human affective behavior analysis focuses on analyzing human expressions or other behaviors, which helps improve the understanding of human psychology. CVPR 2023 Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) makes great efforts to provide the diversity data for the recognition of the commonly used emotion representations, including Action Units~(AU), basic expression categories and Valence-Arousal~(VA). In this paper, we introduce our submission to the CVPR 2023: ABAW5 for AU detection, expression classification, VA estimation and emotional reaction intensity (ERI) estimation. First of all, we introduce the vision information from an MAE model, which has been pre-trained on a large-scale face image dataset in a self-supervised manner. Then the MAE encoder part is finetuned on the ABAW challenges on the single frame of Aff-wild2 dataset. We also exploit the multi-modal and temporal information from the videos and design a transformer-based framework to fusion the multi-modal features. Moreover, we construct a novel two-branch collaboration training strategy to further enhance the model generalization by randomly interpolating the logits space. The extensive quantitative experiments, as well as ablation studies on the Aff-Wild2 dataset and Hume-Reaction dataset prove the effectiveness of our proposed method.

InterMulti:Multi-view Multimodal Interactions with Text-dominated Hierarchical High-order Fusion for Emotion Analysis

Humans are sophisticated at reading interlocutors' emotions from multimodal signals, such as speech contents, voice tones and facial expressions. However, machines might struggle to understand various emotions due to the difficulty of effectively decoding emotions from the complex interactions between multimodal signals. In this paper, we propose a multimodal emotion analysis framework, InterMulti, to capture complex multimodal interactions from different views and identify emotions from multimodal signals. Our proposed framework decomposes signals of different modalities into three kinds of multimodal interaction representations, including a modality-full interaction representation, a modality-shared interaction representation, and three modality-specific interaction representations. Additionally, to balance the contribution of different modalities and learn a more informative latent interaction representation, we developed a novel Text-dominated Hierarchical High-order Fusion(THHF) module. THHF module reasonably integrates the above three kinds of representations into a comprehensive multimodal interaction representation. Extensive experimental results on widely used datasets, (i.e.) MOSEI, MOSI and IEMOCAP, demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art.

EffMulti: Efficiently Modeling Complex Multimodal Interactions for Emotion Analysis

Humans are skilled in reading the interlocutor's emotion from multimodal signals, including spoken words, simultaneous speech, and facial expressions. It is still a challenge to effectively decode emotions from the complex interactions of multimodal signals. In this paper, we design three kinds of multimodal latent representations to refine the emotion analysis process and capture complex multimodal interactions from different views, including a intact three-modal integrating representation, a modality-shared representation, and three modality-individual representations. Then, a modality-semantic hierarchical fusion is proposed to reasonably incorporate these representations into a comprehensive interaction representation. The experimental results demonstrate that our EffMulti outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The compelling performance benefits from its well-designed framework with ease of implementation, lower computing complexity, and less trainable parameters.

Transformer-based Multimodal Information Fusion for Facial Expression Analysis

Facial expression analysis has been a crucial research problem in the computer vision area. With the recent development of deep learning techniques and large-scale in-the-wild annotated datasets, facial expression analysis is now aimed at challenges in real world settings. In this paper, we introduce our submission to CVPR2022 Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) that defines four competition tasks, including expression classification, action unit detection, valence-arousal estimation, and a multi-task-learning. The available multimodal information consist of spoken words, speech prosody, and visual expression in videos. Our work proposes four unified transformer-based network frameworks to create the fusion of the above multimodal information. The preliminary results on the official Aff-Wild2 dataset are reported and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Encoding Frequency Constraints in Preventive Unit Commitment Using Deep Learning with Region-of-Interest Active Sampling

With the increasing penetration of renewable energy, frequency response and its security are of significant concerns for reliable power system operations. Frequency-constrained unit commitment (FCUC) is proposed to address this challenge. Despite existing efforts in modeling frequency characteristics in unit commitment (UC), current strategies can only handle oversimplified low-order frequency response models and do not consider wide-range operating conditions. This paper presents a generic data-driven framework for FCUC under high renewable penetration. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are trained to predict the frequency response using real data or high-fidelity simulation data. Next, the DNN is reformulated as a set of mixed-integer linear constraints to be incorporated into the ordinary UC formulation. In the data generation phase, all possible power injections are considered, and a region-of-interests active sampling is proposed to include power injection samples with frequency nadirs closer to the UFLC threshold, which significantly enhances the accuracy of frequency constraints in FCUC. The proposed FCUC is verified on the the IEEE 39-bus system. Then, a full-order dynamic model simulation using PSS/E verifies the effectiveness of FCUC in frequency-secure generator commitments.