Neural Architecture Searching for Facial Attributes-based Depression Recognition

Recent studies show that depression can be partially reflected from human facial attributes. Since facial attributes have various data structure and carry different information, existing approaches fail to specifically consider the optimal way to extract depression-related features from each of them, as well as investigates the best fusion strategy. In this paper, we propose to extend Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technique for designing an optimal model for multiple facial attributes-based depression recognition, which can be efficiently and robustly implemented in a small dataset. Our approach first conducts a warmer up step to the feature extractor of each facial attribute, aiming to largely reduce the search space and providing customized architecture, where each feature extractor can be either a Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) or Graph Neural Networks (GNN). Then, we conduct an end-to-end architecture search for all feature extractors and the fusion network, allowing the complementary depression cues to be optimally combined with less redundancy. The experimental results on AVEC 2016 dataset show that the model explored by our approach achieves breakthrough performance with 27\% and 30\% RMSE and MAE improvements over the existing state-of-the-art. In light of these findings, this paper provides solid evidences and a strong baseline for applying NAS to time-series data-based mental health analysis.

Learnable Hypergraph Laplacian for Hypergraph Learning

HyperGraph Convolutional Neural Networks (HGCNNs) have demonstrated their potential in modeling high-order relations preserved in graph structured data. However, most existing convolution filters are localized and determined by the pre-defined initial hypergraph topology, neglecting to explore implicit and long-ange relations in real-world data. In this paper, we propose the first learning-based method tailored for constructing adaptive hypergraph structure, termed HypERgrAph Laplacian aDaptor (HERALD), which serves as a generic plug-in-play module for improving the representational power of HGCNNs. Specifically, HERALD adaptively optimizes the adjacency relationship between hypernodes and hyperedges in an end-to-end manner and thus the task-aware hypergraph is learned. Furthermore, HERALD employs the self-attention mechanism to capture the non-local paired-nodes relation. Extensive experiments on various popular hypergraph datasets for node classification and graph classification tasks demonstrate that our approach obtains consistent and considerable performance enhancement, proving its effectiveness and generalization ability.