# Multitask Multi-database Emotion Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.04127 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04127/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [AffectNet: A Database for Facial Expression, Valence, and Arousal Computing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03985/) (2017)
- [Expression, Affect, Action Unit Recognition: Aff-Wild2, Multi-Task Learning and ArcFace](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04855/) (2019)
- [Deep Affect Prediction in-the-wild: Aff-Wild Database and Challenge, Deep Architectures, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10938/) (2018)
- [Analysing Affective Behavior in the First ABAW 2020 Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11409/) (2020)
- [Affect Analysis in-the-wild: Valence-Arousal, Expressions, Action Units and a Unified Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15792/) (2021)
- [Distribution Matching for Heterogeneous Multi-Task Learning: a Large-scale Face Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03790/) (2021)
- [Analysing Affective Behavior in the second ABAW2 Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15318/) (2021)
- [Face Behavior a la carte: Expressions, Affect and Action Units in a Single Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11111/) (2019)
- [Aff-Wild2: Extending the Aff-Wild Database for Affect Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07770/) (2018)
- [From Facial Expression Recognition to Interpersonal Relation Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06426/) (2016)
- [Two-Stream Aural-Visual Affect Analysis in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03399/) (2020)
- [Multitask Emotion Recognition with Incomplete Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03557/) (2020)
- [LP-3DCNN: Unveiling Local Phase in 3D Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03498/) (2019)
- [M3T: Multi-Modal Continuous Valence-Arousal Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02957/) (2020)
- [Affect Expression Behaviour Analysis in the Wild using Spatio-Channel Attention and Complementary Context Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14440/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [ABAW: Valence-Arousal Estimation, Expression Recognition, Action Unit Detection & Multi-Task Learning Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10659/) (2022)
- [ABAW: Learning from Synthetic Data & Multi-Task Learning Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01138/) (2022)
- [ABAW: Valence-Arousal Estimation, Expression Recognition, Action Unit Detection & Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01498/) (2023)
- [The 6th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19344/) (2024)
- [7th ABAW Competition: Multi-Task Learning and Compound Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03835/) (2024)
- [Transformer-based Multimodal Information Fusion for Facial Expression Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12367/) (2022)
- [Leveraging TCN and Transformer for effective visual-audio fusion in continuous emotion recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08356/) (2023)
- [An Ensemble Approach for Facial Expression Analysis in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12891/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Fusion Method with Spatiotemporal Sequences and Relationship Learning for Valence-Arousal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12425/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Emotion Recognition using Audio-Video Transformer Fusion with Cross Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18552/) (2024)
- [Consensual Collaborative Training And Knowledge Distillation Based Facial Expression Recognition Under Noisy Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04746/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Distillation of Emotion Knowledge from LLMs for Zero-Shot Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18040/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we introduce our submission to the 2nd Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) 2021 competition. We train a unified deep learning model on multi-databases to perform two tasks: seven basic facial expressions prediction and valence-arousal estimation. Since these databases do not contains labels for all the two tasks, we have applied the distillation knowledge technique to train two networks: one teacher and one student model. The student model will be trained using both ground truth labels and soft labels derived from the pretrained teacher model. During the training, we add one more task, which is the combination of the two mentioned tasks, for better exploiting inter-task correlations. We also exploit the sharing videos between the two tasks of the AffWild2 database that is used in the competition, to further improve the performance of the network. Experiment results shows that the network have achieved promising results on the validation set of the AffWild2 database. Code and pretrained model are publicly available at https://github.com/glmanhtu/multitask-abaw-2021