首次实现面部情感的因果图发现,让模型自动理解表情肌肉间的因果关系。
CausalAffect: Causal Discovery for Facial Affective Understanding
- 构建双层极性与方向感知的因果层次结构,融合群体规律与个体适应性。
- 在6个基准上同时提升动作单元检测与表情识别性能,超越现有方法。
- 无需标注数据或人工先验,可发现心理学理论支持及新发现的抑制关系。
从面部行为理解人类情感不仅需要精准识别,还需对驱动肌肉激活及其表达结果的潜在依赖关系进行结构化推理。尽管动作单元(AUs)长期作为情感计算的基础,现有方法很少能直接从数据中推断出AU与表情之间心理上合理的因果关系。我们提出CausalAffect,首个面向面部情感分析的因果图发现框架。该框架通过两级极性与方向感知的因果层次结构,建模AU-AU与AU-表情之间的依赖关系,整合群体层面的规律与样本自适应结构。特征级反事实干预机制进一步强化真实因果效应,抑制虚假相关。关键在于,本方法无需联合标注数据或人工设定因果先验,却能恢复与已有心理学理论一致的因果结构,并揭示新的抑制性及此前未被描述的依赖关系。在六个基准上的大量实验表明,CausalAffect在动作单元检测与表情识别两方面均达到当前最佳性能,建立了因果发现与可解释面部行为之间的原则性联系。所有训练模型与源代码将在论文接受后公开。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Understanding human affect from facial behavior requires not only accurate recognition but also structured reasoning over the latent dependencies that drive muscle activations and their expressive outcomes. Although Action Units (AUs) have long served as the foundation of affective computing, existing approaches rarely address how to infer psychologically plausible causal relations between AUs and expressions directly from data. We propose CausalAffect, the first framework for causal graph discovery in facial affect analysis. CausalAffect models AU-AU and AU-Expression dependencies through a two-level polarity and direction aware causal hierarchy that integrates population-level regularities with sample-adaptive structures. A feature-level counterfactual intervention mechanism further enforces true causal effects while suppressing spurious correlations. Crucially, our approach requires neither jointly annotated datasets nor handcrafted causal priors, yet it recovers causal structures consistent with established psychological theories while revealing novel inhibitory and previously uncharacterized dependencies. Extensive experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate that CausalAffect advances the state of the art in both AU detection and expression recognition, establishing a principled connection between causal discovery and interpretable facial behavior. All trained models and source code will be released upon acceptance.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。