DAT: Dialogue-Aware Transformer with Modality-Group Fusion for Human Engagement Estimation

Engagement estimation plays a crucial role in understanding human social behaviors, attracting increasing research interests in fields such as affective computing and human-computer interaction. In this paper, we propose a Dialogue-Aware Transformer framework (DAT) with Modality-Group Fusion (MGF), which relies solely on audio-visual input and is language-independent, for estimating human engagement in conversations. Specifically, our method employs a modality-group fusion strategy that independently fuses audio and visual features within each modality for each person before inferring the entire audio-visual content. This strategy significantly enhances the model's performance and robustness. Additionally, to better estimate the target participant's engagement levels, the introduced Dialogue-Aware Transformer considers both the participant's behavior and cues from their conversational partners. Our method was rigorously tested in the Multi-Domain Engagement Estimation Challenge held by MultiMediate'24, demonstrating notable improvements in engagement-level regression precision over the baseline model. Notably, our approach achieves a CCC score of 0.76 on the NoXi Base test set and an average CCC of 0.64 across the NoXi Base, NoXi-Add, and MPIIGI test sets.

Multi-intent Aware Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation

Intent is a significant latent factor influencing user-item interaction sequences. Prevalent sequence recommendation models that utilize contrastive learning predominantly rely on single-intent representations to direct the training process. However, this paradigm oversimplifies real-world recommendation scenarios, attempting to encapsulate the diversity of intents within the single-intent level representation. SR models considering multi-intent information in their framework are more likely to reflect real-life recommendation scenarios accurately.

UniLearn: Enhancing Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition through Unified Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning on Images and Videos

Dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER) is essential for understanding human emotions and behavior. However, conventional DFER methods, which primarily use dynamic facial data, often underutilize static expression images and their labels, limiting their performance and robustness. To overcome this, we introduce UniLearn, a novel unified learning paradigm that integrates static facial expression recognition (SFER) data to enhance DFER task. UniLearn employs a dual-modal self-supervised pre-training method, leveraging both facial expression images and videos to enhance a ViT model's spatiotemporal representation capability. Then, the pre-trained model is fine-tuned on both static and dynamic expression datasets using a joint fine-tuning strategy. To prevent negative transfer during joint fine-tuning, we introduce an innovative Mixture of Adapter Experts (MoAE) module that enables task-specific knowledge acquisition and effectively integrates information from both static and dynamic expression data. Extensive experiments demonstrate UniLearn's effectiveness in leveraging complementary information from static and dynamic facial data, leading to more accurate and robust DFER. UniLearn consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on FERV39K, MAFW, and DFEW benchmarks, with weighted average recall (WAR) of 53.65\%, 58.44\%, and 76.68\%, respectively. The source code and model weights will be publicly available at \url{https://github.com/MSA-LMC/UniLearn}.

Multimodal Multi-turn Conversation Stance Detection: A Challenge Dataset and Effective Model

Stance detection, which aims to identify public opinion towards specific targets using social media data, is an important yet challenging task. With the proliferation of diverse multimodal social media content including text, and images multimodal stance detection (MSD) has become a crucial research area. However, existing MSD studies have focused on modeling stance within individual text-image pairs, overlooking the multi-party conversational contexts that naturally occur on social media. This limitation stems from a lack of datasets that authentically capture such conversational scenarios, hindering progress in conversational MSD. To address this, we introduce a new multimodal multi-turn conversational stance detection dataset (called MmMtCSD). To derive stances from this challenging dataset, we propose a novel multimodal large language model stance detection framework (MLLM-SD), that learns joint stance representations from textual and visual modalities. Experiments on MmMtCSD show state-of-the-art performance of our proposed MLLM-SD approach for multimodal stance detection. We believe that MmMtCSD will contribute to advancing real-world applications of stance detection research.

From Static to Dynamic: Adapting Landmark-Aware Image Models for Facial Expression Recognition in Videos

Dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER) in the wild is still hindered by data limitations, e.g., insufficient quantity and diversity of pose, occlusion and illumination, as well as the inherent ambiguity of facial expressions. In contrast, static facial expression recognition (SFER) currently shows much higher performance and can benefit from more abundant high-quality training data. Moreover, the appearance features and dynamic dependencies of DFER remain largely unexplored. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a novel Static-to-Dynamic model (S2D) that leverages existing SFER knowledge and dynamic information implicitly encoded in extracted facial landmark-aware features, thereby significantly improving DFER performance. Firstly, we build and train an image model for SFER, which incorporates a standard Vision Transformer (ViT) and Multi-View Complementary Prompters (MCPs) only. Then, we obtain our video model (i.e., S2D), for DFER, by inserting Temporal-Modeling Adapters (TMAs) into the image model. MCPs enhance facial expression features with landmark-aware features inferred by an off-the-shelf facial landmark detector. And the TMAs capture and model the relationships of dynamic changes in facial expressions, effectively extending the pre-trained image model for videos. Notably, MCPs and TMAs only increase a fraction of trainable parameters (less than +10\%) to the original image model. Moreover, we present a novel Emotion-Anchors (i.e., reference samples for each emotion category) based Self-Distillation Loss to reduce the detrimental influence of ambiguous emotion labels, further enhancing our S2D. Experiments conducted on popular SFER and DFER datasets show that we achieve the state of the art.

Multimodal Feature Extraction and Fusion for Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation and Expression Classification in Videos with Transformers

In this paper, we present our solutions to the two sub-challenges of Affective Behavior Analysis in the wild (ABAW) 2023: the Emotional Reaction Intensity (ERI) Estimation Challenge and Expression (Expr) Classification Challenge. ABAW 2023 focuses on the problem of affective behavior analysis in the wild, with the goal of creating machines and robots that have the ability to understand human feelings, emotions and behaviors, which can effectively contribute to the advent of a more intelligent future. In our work, we use different models and tools for the Hume-Reaction dataset to extract features of various aspects, such as audio features, video features, etc. By analyzing, combining, and studying these multimodal features, we effectively improve the accuracy of the model for multimodal sentiment prediction. For the Emotional Reaction Intensity (ERI) Estimation Challenge, our method shows excellent results with a Pearson coefficient on the validation dataset, exceeding the baseline method by 84 percent.

MRS-VPR: a multi-resolution sampling based global visual place recognition method

Place recognition and loop closure detection are challenging for long-term visual navigation tasks. SeqSLAM is considered to be one of the most successful approaches to achieving long-term localization under varying environmental conditions and changing viewpoints. It depends on a brute-force, time-consuming sequential matching method. We propose MRS-VPR, a multi-resolution, sampling-based place recognition method, which can significantly improve the matching efficiency and accuracy in sequential matching. The novelty of this method lies in the coarse-to-fine searching pipeline and a particle filter-based global sampling scheme, that can balance the matching efficiency and accuracy in the long-term navigation task. Moreover, our model works much better than SeqSLAM when the testing sequence has a much smaller scale than the reference sequence. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient in locating short temporary trajectories within long-term reference ones without losing accuracy compared to SeqSLAM.