PhD Thesis Proposal - Yufeng Yin

PhD Thesis Proposal - Yufeng Yin

Committee Members: Mohammad Soleymani (chair), Jonathan Gratch, Mayank Kejriwal, Lynn Miller, Maja Mataric, and Xuezhe Ma

Title: Towards Generalizable Facial Expression and Emotion Recognition

Abstract: Facial expression and emotion recognition are critical components of human behavior understanding. However, the performance of automatic recognition methods degrades when evaluated across datasets or subjects, due to variations in humans and environmental factors. The manual coding required by supervised methods also presents significant practical limitations since they are not feasible when working with new datasets or individuals.

In this thesis proposal, we investigate how to improve the generalization ability of the perception model through representation learning and synthetic data generation with minimal human efforts. (i) We explore unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approaches to obtain domain invariant and discriminative features without any target labels. The experiments show that UDA can effectively reduce the domain gap between datasets or subjects and improve model cross corpus performance for emotion recognition. (ii) We explore approaches for synthetic data generation to address the problems of the scarcity of labeled data and the diversity of subjects. Our results indicate that synthetic data can not only improve action unit (AU) detection performance but also fairness across genders, demonstrating its potential to solve AU detection in the wild. We will also discuss our future work involving unsupervised personalization on unseen speakers for emotion recognition through feature representation learning and label distribution calibration. Our proposed methods enhance model recognition accuracy and generalization ability to unseen subjects and datasets, paving the way for more effective human behavior analysis in a variety of applications.

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Melissa Ochoa

Event Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/94638614965?pwd=c0ozL09VVjVBNmNwRmQ4NTAybWwzdz09