MIP-GAF: A MLLM-annotated Benchmark for Most Important Person Localization and Group Context Understanding

Estimating the Most Important Person (MIP) in any social event setup is a challenging problem mainly due to contextual complexity and scarcity of labeled data. Moreover, the causality aspects of MIP estimation are quite subjective and diverse. To this end, we aim to address the problem by annotating a large-scale `in-the-wild' dataset for identifying human perceptions about the `Most Important Person (MIP)' in an image. The paper provides a thorough description of our proposed Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) based data annotation strategy, and a thorough data quality analysis. Further, we perform a comprehensive benchmarking of the proposed dataset utilizing state-of-the-art MIP localization methods, indicating a significant drop in performance compared to existing datasets. The performance drop shows that the existing MIP localization algorithms must be more robust with respect to `in-the-wild' situations. We believe the proposed dataset will play a vital role in building the next-generation social situation understanding methods. The code and data is available at https://github.com/surbhimadan92/MIP-GAF.

MAGIC-TBR: Multiview Attention Fusion for Transformer-based Bodily Behavior Recognition in Group Settings

Bodily behavioral language is an important social cue, and its automated analysis helps in enhancing the understanding of artificial intelligence systems. Furthermore, behavioral language cues are essential for active engagement in social agent-based user interactions. Despite the progress made in computer vision for tasks like head and body pose estimation, there is still a need to explore the detection of finer behaviors such as gesturing, grooming, or fumbling. This paper proposes a multiview attention fusion method named MAGIC-TBR that combines features extracted from videos and their corresponding Discrete Cosine Transform coefficients via a transformer-based approach. The experiments are conducted on the BBSI dataset and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed feature fusion with multiview attention. The code is available at: https://github.com/surbhimadan92/MAGIC-TBR

Efficient Labelling of Affective Video Datasets via Few-Shot & Multi-Task Contrastive Learning

Whilst deep learning techniques have achieved excellent emotion prediction, they still require large amounts of labelled training data, which are (a) onerous and tedious to compile, and (b) prone to errors and biases. We propose Multi-Task Contrastive Learning for Affect Representation (\textbf{MT-CLAR}) for few-shot affect inference. MT-CLAR combines multi-task learning with a Siamese network trained via contrastive learning to infer from a pair of expressive facial images (a) the (dis)similarity between the facial expressions, and (b) the difference in valence and arousal levels of the two faces. We further extend the image-based MT-CLAR framework for automated video labelling where, given one or a few labelled video frames (termed \textit{support-set}), MT-CLAR labels the remainder of the video for valence and arousal. Experiments are performed on the AFEW-VA dataset with multiple support-set configurations; moreover, supervised learning on representations learnt via MT-CLAR are used for valence, arousal and categorical emotion prediction on the AffectNet and AFEW-VA datasets. The results show that valence and arousal predictions via MT-CLAR are very comparable to the state-of-the-art (SOTA), and we significantly outperform SOTA with a support-set $\approx$6\% the size of the video dataset.

Explainable Depression Detection via Head Motion Patterns

While depression has been studied via multimodal non-verbal behavioural cues, head motion behaviour has not received much attention as a biomarker. This study demonstrates the utility of fundamental head-motion units, termed \emph{kinemes}, for depression detection by adopting two distinct approaches, and employing distinctive features: (a) discovering kinemes from head motion data corresponding to both depressed patients and healthy controls, and (b) learning kineme patterns only from healthy controls, and computing statistics derived from reconstruction errors for both the patient and control classes. Employing machine learning methods, we evaluate depression classification performance on the \emph{BlackDog} and \emph{AVEC2013} datasets. Our findings indicate that: (1) head motion patterns are effective biomarkers for detecting depressive symptoms, and (2) explanatory kineme patterns consistent with prior findings can be observed for the two classes. Overall, we achieve peak F1 scores of 0.79 and 0.82, respectively, over BlackDog and AVEC2013 for binary classification over episodic \emph{thin-slices}, and a peak F1 of 0.72 over videos for AVEC2013.

A Weakly Supervised Approach to Emotion-change Prediction and Improved Mood Inference

Whilst a majority of affective computing research focuses on inferring emotions, examining mood or understanding the \textit{mood-emotion interplay} has received significantly less attention. Building on prior work, we (a) deduce and incorporate emotion-change ($\Delta$) information for inferring mood, without resorting to annotated labels, and (b) attempt mood prediction for long duration video clips, in alignment with the characterisation of mood. We generate the emotion-change ($\Delta$) labels via metric learning from a pre-trained Siamese Network, and use these in addition to mood labels for mood classification. Experiments evaluating \textit{unimodal} (training only using mood labels) vs \textit{multimodal} (training using mood plus $\Delta$ labels) models show that mood prediction benefits from the incorporation of emotion-change information, emphasising the importance of modelling the mood-emotion interplay for effective mood inference.

Explainable Human-centered Traits from Head Motion and Facial Expression Dynamics

We explore the efficacy of multimodal behavioral cues for explainable prediction of personality and interview-specific traits. We utilize elementary head-motion units named kinemes, atomic facial movements termed action units and speech features to estimate these human-centered traits. Empirical results confirm that kinemes and action units enable discovery of multiple trait-specific behaviors while also enabling explainability in support of the predictions. For fusing cues, we explore decision and feature-level fusion, and an additive attention-based fusion strategy which quantifies the relative importance of the three modalities for trait prediction. Examining various long-short term memory (LSTM) architectures for classification and regression on the MIT Interview and First Impressions Candidate Screening (FICS) datasets, we note that: (1) Multimodal approaches outperform unimodal counterparts; (2) Efficient trait predictions and plausible explanations are achieved with both unimodal and multimodal approaches, and (3) Following the thin-slice approach, effective trait prediction is achieved even from two-second behavioral snippets.

Outlier-based Autism Detection using Longitudinal Structural MRI

Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) using clinical evaluation (cognitive tests) is challenging due to wide variations amongst individuals. Since no effective treatment exists, prompt and reliable ASD diagnosis can enable the effective preparation of treatment regimens. This paper proposes structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI)-based ASD diagnosis via an outlier detection approach. To learn Spatio-temporal patterns in structural brain connectivity, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is trained exclusively with sMRI scans of healthy subjects. Given a stack of three adjacent slices as input, the GAN generator reconstructs the next three adjacent slices; the GAN discriminator then identifies ASD sMRI scan reconstructions as outliers. This model is compared against two other baselines -- a simpler UNet and a sophisticated Self-Attention GAN. Axial, Coronal, and Sagittal sMRI slices from the multi-site ABIDE II dataset are used for evaluation. Extensive experiments reveal that our ASD detection framework performs comparably with the state-of-the-art with far fewer training data. Furthermore, longitudinal data (two scans per subject over time) achieve 17-28% higher accuracy than cross-sectional data (one scan per subject). Among other findings, metrics employed for model training as well as reconstruction loss computation impact detection performance, and the coronal modality is found to best encode structural information for ASD detection.

Automated Parkinson's Disease Detection and Affective Analysis from Emotional EEG Signals

While Parkinson's disease (PD) is typically characterized by motor disorder, there is evidence of diminished emotion perception in PD patients. This study examines the utility of affective Electroencephalography (EEG) signals to understand emotional differences between PD vs Healthy Controls (HC), and for automated PD detection. Employing traditional machine learning and deep learning methods, we explore (a) dimensional and categorical emotion recognition, and (b) PD vs HC classification from emotional EEG signals. Our results reveal that PD patients comprehend arousal better than valence, and amongst emotion categories, \textit{fear}, \textit{disgust} and \textit{surprise} less accurately, and \textit{sadness} most accurately. Mislabeling analyses confirm confounds among opposite-valence emotions with PD data. Emotional EEG responses also achieve near-perfect PD vs HC recognition. {Cumulatively, our study demonstrates that (a) examining \textit{implicit} responses alone enables (i) discovery of valence-related impairments in PD patients, and (ii) differentiation of PD from HC, and (b) emotional EEG analysis is an ecologically-valid, effective, facile and sustainable tool for PD diagnosis vis-\'a-vis self reports, expert assessments and resting-state analysis.}

Expert and Crowd-Guided Affect Annotation and Prediction

We employ crowdsourcing to acquire time-continuous affective annotations for movie clips, and refine noisy models trained from these crowd annotations incorporating expert information within a Multi-task Learning (MTL) framework. We propose a novel \textbf{e}xpert \textbf{g}uided MTL (EG-MTL) algorithm, which minimizes the loss with respect to both crowd and expert labels to learn a set of weights corresponding to each movie clip for which crowd annotations are acquired. We employ EG-MTL to solve two problems, namely, \textbf{\texttt{P1}}: where dynamic annotations acquired from both experts and crowdworkers for the \textbf{Validation} set are used to train a regression model with audio-visual clip descriptors as features, and predict dynamic arousal and valence levels on 5--15 second snippets derived from the clips; and \textbf{\texttt{P2}}: where a classification model trained on the \textbf{Validation} set using dynamic crowd and expert annotations (as features) and static affective clip labels is used for binary emotion recognition on the \textbf{Evaluation} set for which only dynamic crowd annotations are available. Observed experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the EG-MTL algorithm, which is reflected via improved arousal and valence estimation for \textbf{\texttt{P1}}, and higher recognition accuracy for \textbf{\texttt{P2}}.

Head Matters: Explainable Human-centered Trait Prediction from Head Motion Dynamics

We demonstrate the utility of elementary head-motion units termed kinemes for behavioral analytics to predict personality and interview traits. Transforming head-motion patterns into a sequence of kinemes facilitates discovery of latent temporal signatures characterizing the targeted traits, thereby enabling both efficient and explainable trait prediction. Utilizing Kinemes and Facial Action Coding System (FACS) features to predict (a) OCEAN personality traits on the First Impressions Candidate Screening videos, and (b) Interview traits on the MIT dataset, we note that: (1) A Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) network trained with kineme sequences performs better than or similar to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained with facial images; (2) Accurate predictions and explanations are achieved on combining FACS action units (AUs) with kinemes, and (3) Prediction performance is affected by the time-length over which head and facial movements are observed.