Variance-Aware Bi-Attention Expression Transformer for Open-Set Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild

Despite the great accomplishments of facial expression recognition (FER) models in closed-set scenarios, they still lack open-world robustness when it comes to handling unknown samples. To address the demands of operating in an open environment, open-set FER models should improve their performance in rejecting unknown samples while maintaining their efficiency in recognizing known expressions. With this goal in mind, we propose an open-set FER framework named Variance-Aware Bi-Attention Expression Transformer (VBExT), which enhances conventional closed-set FER models with open-world robustness for unknown samples. Specifically, to make full use of the expression representation capabilities of learned features, we introduce a bi-attention feature augmentation mechanism that learns the important regions and integrates the hierarchical features extracted by the emotional CNN backbone. We also propose a variance-aware distribution modeling method that adapts to the diverse distribution of different expression classes in the open environment, thereby enhancing the detection ability of unknown expressions. Additionally, we have constructed a Fine-Grained Light Facial Expression dataset that includes 30 different light brightnesses to better validate the efficiency of VBExT. Extensive experiments and ablation studies show that VBExT significantly improves the performance of open-set FER and achieves state-of-the-art results on CFEE (lab, basic), RAF-DB (wild, basic+compound), and FGL-FE (multiple light brightnesses, basic).