Robust Light-Weight Facial Affective Behavior Recognition with CLIP

Human affective behavior analysis aims to delve into human expressions and behaviors to deepen our understanding of human emotions. Basic expression categories (EXPR) and Action Units (AUs) are two essential components in this analysis, which categorize emotions and break down facial movements into elemental units, respectively. Despite advancements, existing approaches in expression classification and AU detection often necessitate complex models and substantial computational resources, limiting their applicability in everyday settings. In this work, we introduce the first lightweight framework adept at efficiently tackling both expression classification and AU detection. This framework employs a frozen CLIP image encoder alongside a trainable multilayer perceptron (MLP), enhanced with Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) for robustness and a loss landscape flattening strategy for improved generalization. Experimental results on the Aff-wild2 dataset demonstrate superior performance in comparison to the baseline while maintaining minimal computational demands, offering a practical solution for affective behavior analysis. The code is available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/Affective-Behavior-Analysis-M2-PURDUE.