Emotion in a Bottle: Information Bottleneck Guided Disentanglement for Emotion Domain Adaptation

Visual emotion recognition (VER), which aims to understand human emotional reactions to different visual stimuli, has garnered increasing attention. However, the inherent ambiguity of emotional features presents significant challenges for data annotation in supervised learning paradigms. To address this limitation, emotion domain adaptation (EDA) facilitates knowledge transfer from labeled source domains to unlabeled target domains. Recently, large visual-language models such as CLIP have demonstrated impressive transfer performance on traditional UDA tasks. However, when generalizing to more abstract concepts such as emotion, the misalignment between CLIP and emotion spaces greatly affects the model performance. To address these challenges, we propose a CLIP-based emotion disentanglement (EmoD) framework designed for EDA. Leveraging perspectives from information bottleneck theory, EmoD implements a disentangler network that extracts emotion-specific features while removing redundant emotion-agnostic information. It also incorporates cross-domain feature alignment to reduce the affective gap between domains. Experimental evaluations in six EDA settings demonstrate that EmoD achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing traditional CLIP-based UDA methods by an average of 2.53%.