Uncertain Graph Neural Networks for Facial Action Unit Detection

Capturing the dependencies among different facial action units (AU) is extremely important for the AU detection task. Many studies have employed graph-based deep learning methods to exploit the dependencies among AUs. However, the dependencies among AUs in real world data are often noisy and the uncertainty is essential to be taken into consideration. Rather than employing a deterministic mode, we propose an uncertain graph neural network (UGN) to learn the probabilistic mask that simultaneously captures both the individual dependencies among AUs and the uncertainties. Further, we propose an adaptive weighted loss function based on the epistemic uncertainties to adaptively vary the weights of the training samples during the training process to account for unbalanced data distributions among AUs. We also provide an insightful analysis on how the uncertainties are related to the performance of AU detection. Extensive experiments, conducted on two benchmark datasets, i.e., BP4D and DISFA, demonstrate our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.