Towards Regularized Mixture of Predictions for Class-Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Facial Expression Recognition

Abstract

Semi-supervised facial expression recognition (SSFER) effectively assigns pseudo-labels to confident unlabeled samples when only limited emotional annotations are available. Existing SSFER methods are typically built upon an assumption of the class-balanced distribution. However, they are far from real-world applications due to biased pseudo-labels caused by class imbalance. To alleviate this issue, we propose Regularized Mixture of Predictions (ReMoP), a simple yet effective method to generate high-quality pseudo-labels for imbalanced samples. Specifically, we first integrate feature similarity into the linear prediction to learn a mixture of predictions. Furthermore, we introduce a class regularization term that constrains the feature geometry to mitigate imbalance bias. Being practically simple, our method can be integrated with existing semi-supervised learning and SSFER methods to tackle the challenge associated with class-imbalanced SSFER effectively. Extensive experiments on four facial expression datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method across various imbalanced conditions. The source code is made publicly available at https://github.com/hangyu94/ReMoP.