Dual-Constrained Dynamical Neural ODEs for Ambiguity-aware Continuous Emotion Prediction

There has been a significant focus on modelling emotion ambiguity in recent years, with advancements made in representing emotions as distributions to capture ambiguity. However, there has been comparatively less effort devoted to the consideration of temporal dependencies in emotion distributions which encodes ambiguity in perceived emotions that evolve smoothly over time. Recognizing the benefits of using constrained dynamical neural ordinary differential equations (CD-NODE) to model time series as dynamic processes, we propose an ambiguity-aware dual-constrained Neural ODE approach to model the dynamics of emotion distributions on arousal and valence. In our approach, we utilize ODEs parameterised by neural networks to estimate the distribution parameters, and we integrate additional constraints to restrict the range of the system outputs to ensure the validity of predicted distributions. We evaluated our proposed system on the publicly available RECOLA dataset and observed very promising performance across a range of evaluation metrics.

OPAL: Occlusion Pattern Aware Loss for Unsupervised Light Field Disparity Estimation

Light field disparity estimation is an essential task in computer vision with various applications. Although supervised learning-based methods have achieved both higher accuracy and efficiency than traditional optimization-based methods, the dependency on ground-truth disparity for training limits the overall generalization performance not to say for real-world scenarios where the ground-truth disparity is hard to capture. In this paper, we argue that unsupervised methods can achieve comparable accuracy, but, more importantly, much higher generalization capacity and efficiency than supervised methods. Specifically, we present the Occlusion Pattern Aware Loss, named OPAL, which successfully extracts and encodes the general occlusion patterns inherent in the light field for loss calculation. OPAL enables: i) accurate and robust estimation by effectively handling occlusions without using any ground-truth information for training and ii) much efficient performance by significantly reducing the network parameters required for accurate inference. Besides, a transformer-based network and a refinement module are proposed for achieving even more accurate results. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method not only significantly improves the accuracy compared with the SOTA unsupervised methods, but also possesses strong generalization capacity, even for real-world data, compared with supervised methods. Our code will be made publicly available.

A Novel Markovian Framework for Integrating Absolute and Relative Ordinal Emotion Information

There is growing interest in affective computing for the representation and prediction of emotions along ordinal scales. However, the term ordinal emotion label has been used to refer to both absolute notions such as low or high arousal, as well as relation notions such as arousal is higher at one instance compared to another. In this paper, we introduce the terminology absolute and relative ordinal labels to make this distinction clear and investigate both with a view to integrate them and exploit their complementary nature. We propose a Markovian framework referred to as Dynamic Ordinal Markov Model (DOMM) that makes use of both absolute and relative ordinal information, to improve speech based ordinal emotion prediction. Finally, the proposed framework is validated on two speech corpora commonly used in affective computing, the RECOLA and the IEMOCAP databases, across a range of system configurations. The results consistently indicate that integrating relative ordinal information improves absolute ordinal emotion prediction.

Deep Learning Algorithms for Rotating Machinery Intelligent Diagnosis: An Open Source Benchmark Study

With the development of artificial intelligence and deep learning (DL) techniques, rotating machinery intelligent diagnosis has gone through tremendous progress with verified success and the classification accuracies of many DL-based intelligent diagnosis algorithms are tending to 100\%. However, different datasets, configurations, and hyper-parameters are often recommended to be used in performance verification for different types of models, and few open source codes are made public for evaluation and comparisons. Therefore, unfair comparisons and ineffective improvement may exist in rotating machinery intelligent diagnosis, which limits the advancement of this field. To address these issues, we perform an extensive evaluation of four kinds of models with various datasets to provide a benchmark study within the same framework. In this paper, we first gather most of the publicly available datasets and give the complete benchmark study of DL-based intelligent algorithms under two data split strategies, five input formats, three normalization methods, and four augmentation methods. Second, we integrate the whole evaluation codes into a code library and release this code library to the public for better development of this field. Third, we use the specific-designed cases to point out the existing issues, including class imbalance, generalization ability, interpretability, few-shot learning, and model selection. By these works, we release a unified code framework for comparing and testing models fairly and quickly, emphasize the importance of open source codes, provide the baseline accuracy (a lower bound) to avoid useless improvement, and discuss potential future directions in this field. The code library is available at \url{https://github.com/ZhaoZhibin/DL-based-Intelligent-Diagnosis-Benchmark}.