Mining label-free consistency regularization for noisy facial expression recognition

Abstract Noisy labels are unavoidable in facial expression recognition (FER) task, significantly hindering FER performance in real-world scenarios. Recent advances tackle this problem by leveraging uncertainty for sample partitioning or constructing label distributions. However, these approaches pri...

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Main Authors: Yumei Tan, Haiying Xia, Shuxiang Song
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer 2024-12-01
Series:Complex & Intelligent Systems
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1007/s40747-024-01722-7
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author Yumei Tan
Haiying Xia
Shuxiang Song
author_facet Yumei Tan
Haiying Xia
Shuxiang Song
author_sort Yumei Tan
collection DOAJ
description Abstract Noisy labels are unavoidable in facial expression recognition (FER) task, significantly hindering FER performance in real-world scenarios. Recent advances tackle this problem by leveraging uncertainty for sample partitioning or constructing label distributions. However, these approaches primarily depend on labels, leading to confirmation bias issues and performance degradation. We argue that mining both label-independent features and label-dependent information can mitigate the confirmation bias induced by noisy labels. In this paper, we propose MCR, that is, mining simple yet effective label-free consistency regularization (MCR) to learn robust representations against noisy labels. The proposed MCR incorporates three label-free consistency regularizations: instance-level embedding consistency regularization, pairwise distance consistency regularization, and neighbour consistency regularization. Initially, we employ instance-level embedding consistency regularization to learn instance-level discriminative information from identical facial samples under perturbations in an unsupervised manner. This facilitates the efficacy of mitigating inherent noise in data. Subsequently, a pairwise distance consistency regularization is constructed to regularize the classifier and alleviate bias induced by noisy labels. Finally, we use the neighbour consistency regularization to further strengthen the discriminative capability of the model against noise. Benefiting from the advantages of these three label-free consistency regularizations, MCR can learn discriminative and robust representations against noise. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of MCR on three popular in-the-wild facial expression datasets, including RAF-DB, FERPlus, and AffectNet. Moreover, MCR demonstrates superior generalization capability on other datasets with noisy labels, such as CIFAR100 and Tiny-ImageNet.
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spelling doaj-art-838ea8c7d9334a3e85eaf73dda675c272025-02-02T12:50:02ZengSpringerComplex & Intelligent Systems2199-45362198-60532024-12-0111111710.1007/s40747-024-01722-7Mining label-free consistency regularization for noisy facial expression recognitionYumei Tan0Haiying Xia1Shuxiang Song2School of Computer Science and Engineering, Guangxi Normal UniversityGuangxi Key Laboratory of Brain-inspired Computing and Intelligent Chips, School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Guangxi Normal UniversityGuangxi Key Laboratory of Brain-inspired Computing and Intelligent Chips, School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Guangxi Normal UniversityAbstract Noisy labels are unavoidable in facial expression recognition (FER) task, significantly hindering FER performance in real-world scenarios. Recent advances tackle this problem by leveraging uncertainty for sample partitioning or constructing label distributions. However, these approaches primarily depend on labels, leading to confirmation bias issues and performance degradation. We argue that mining both label-independent features and label-dependent information can mitigate the confirmation bias induced by noisy labels. In this paper, we propose MCR, that is, mining simple yet effective label-free consistency regularization (MCR) to learn robust representations against noisy labels. The proposed MCR incorporates three label-free consistency regularizations: instance-level embedding consistency regularization, pairwise distance consistency regularization, and neighbour consistency regularization. Initially, we employ instance-level embedding consistency regularization to learn instance-level discriminative information from identical facial samples under perturbations in an unsupervised manner. This facilitates the efficacy of mitigating inherent noise in data. Subsequently, a pairwise distance consistency regularization is constructed to regularize the classifier and alleviate bias induced by noisy labels. Finally, we use the neighbour consistency regularization to further strengthen the discriminative capability of the model against noise. Benefiting from the advantages of these three label-free consistency regularizations, MCR can learn discriminative and robust representations against noise. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of MCR on three popular in-the-wild facial expression datasets, including RAF-DB, FERPlus, and AffectNet. Moreover, MCR demonstrates superior generalization capability on other datasets with noisy labels, such as CIFAR100 and Tiny-ImageNet.https://doi.org/10.1007/s40747-024-01722-7Facial expression recognitionLabel-free consistency regularizationUnsupervised contrastive learningNoisy label learning
spellingShingle Yumei Tan
Haiying Xia
Shuxiang Song
Mining label-free consistency regularization for noisy facial expression recognition
Complex & Intelligent Systems
Facial expression recognition
Label-free consistency regularization
Unsupervised contrastive learning
Noisy label learning
title Mining label-free consistency regularization for noisy facial expression recognition
title_full Mining label-free consistency regularization for noisy facial expression recognition
title_fullStr Mining label-free consistency regularization for noisy facial expression recognition
title_full_unstemmed Mining label-free consistency regularization for noisy facial expression recognition
title_short Mining label-free consistency regularization for noisy facial expression recognition
title_sort mining label free consistency regularization for noisy facial expression recognition
topic Facial expression recognition
Label-free consistency regularization
Unsupervised contrastive learning
Noisy label learning
url https://doi.org/10.1007/s40747-024-01722-7
work_keys_str_mv AT yumeitan mininglabelfreeconsistencyregularizationfornoisyfacialexpressionrecognition
AT haiyingxia mininglabelfreeconsistencyregularizationfornoisyfacialexpressionrecognition
AT shuxiangsong mininglabelfreeconsistencyregularizationfornoisyfacialexpressionrecognition