分离表情识别中的模糊性与分布偏移,让模型知道何时该报告不确定、何时该拒绝输入。
Interpretable Uncertainty Routing Separating Emotion Ambiguity from Distribution Shift in Facial Expression Recognition

- 通过分解不确定性,区分标注分歧与数据分布偏移。
- 在最高噪声强度下,检测分布偏移的AUROC达0.699,相关性达0.66。
- 相比单一不确定性方法,能多保留约1.8倍的模糊样本而不降低拒识率。
面部表情识别(FER)本质上存在歧义:人工标注者常有分歧,且模型在真实场景中面临分布偏移。关键在于,这两种情况需采取不同应对策略——分布内歧义样本应报告其不确定性,而分布外输入应被拒绝。然而,单一不确定性分数会混淆两者。本研究探索了面向FER的不确定性分解方法,提出一种基于不确定性感知的路由机制(UAR),利用贝叶斯不确定性中认知型(epistemic)与随机型(aleatoric)成分的分离。通过深度集成全微调的DINOv2模型获取两类不确定性,并分别以独立外部信号验证:随机型不确定性与人工标注分歧相关(斯皮尔曼相关系数0.66,95%置信区间0.64–0.68),认知型不确定性可有效检测图像退化引发的分布偏移,最高噪声等级下平均AUROC达0.699。UAR在保持相同分布外拒绝率下,比单不确定性路由多保留约1.8倍的分布内歧义样本。强基线模型虽能恢复标注分歧,但无法分离歧义与偏移,因而无法实现差异化路由,证明解耦价值在于支持可解释、差异化的决策选择。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Facial expression recognition (FER) is inherently ambiguous: human annotators frequently disagree, and models deployed in real environments face distribution shift. Crucially, these two conditions demand different downstream actions, as ambiguous in-distribution faces should be reported with their ambiguity whereas out-of-distribution inputs should be rejected. However, a single uncertainty score conflates the two. In this study, uncertainty decomposition into aleatoric and epistemic components for FER is investigated, and Uncertainty-Aware Routing (UAR), an inference-time routing mechanism that exploits the separation, is introduced. Specifically, aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties are obtained from a Deep Ensemble of fully fine-tuned DINOv2 models and are each validated against an independent external signal: aleatoric against human annotator disagreement, and epistemic against distribution shift induced by image corruptions. The proposed dual-validation protocol reveals that aleatoric recovers annotator disagreement with Spearman correlation 0.66 (95% CI: 0.64-0.68), and epistemic detects corruption-induced shifts, achieving average AUROC of 0.699 at the highest corruption severity. UAR retains approximately 1.8 times more ambiguous in-distribution faces than single-uncertainty routing at a matched out-of-distribution rejection rate. A strong label-distribution-learning baseline achieves comparable disagreement recovery but cannot separate ambiguity from shift and therefore cannot route, establishing that the value of decomposition lies in the separation enabling interpretable and differentiated action selection.
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