# A Novel Loss Function Utilizing Wasserstein Distance to Reduce Subject-Dependent Noise for Generalizable Models in Affective Computing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10869 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10869/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DeStress: Deep Learning for Unsupervised Identification of Mental Stress in Firefighters from Heart-rate Variability (HRV) Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13213/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotions are an essential part of human behavior that can impact thinking, decision-making, and communication skills. Thus, the ability to accurately monitor and identify emotions can be useful in many human-centered applications such as behavioral training, tracking emotional well-being, and development of human-computer interfaces. The correlation between patterns in physiological data and affective states has allowed for the utilization of deep learning techniques which can accurately detect the affective states of a person. However, the generalisability of existing models is often limited by the subject-dependent noise in the physiological data due to variations in a subject's reactions to stimuli. Hence, we propose a novel cost function that employs Optimal Transport Theory, specifically Wasserstein Distance, to scale the importance of subject-dependent data such that higher importance is assigned to patterns in data that are common across all participants while decreasing the importance of patterns that result from subject-dependent noise. The performance of the proposed cost function is demonstrated through an autoencoder with a multi-class classifier attached to the latent space and trained simultaneously to detect different affective states. An autoencoder with a state-of-the-art loss function i.e., Mean Squared Error, is used as a baseline for comparison with our model across four different commonly used datasets. Centroid and minimum distance between different classes are used as a metrics to indicate the separation between different classes in the latent space. An average increase of 14.75% and 17.75% (from benchmark to proposed loss function) was found for minimum and centroid euclidean distance respectively over all datasets.