# Learning Contrastive Feature Representations for Facial Action Unit Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06165 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06165/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 111 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05394/) (2017)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Visual Feature Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06162/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04592/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00362/) (2020)
- [A Theoretical Analysis of Contrastive Unsupervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09229/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Learning of Visual Representations from Uncurated Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06430/) (2019)
- [BBN: Bilateral-Branch Network with Cumulative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02413/) (2019)
- [Understanding the Behaviour of Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09740/) (2020)
- [Spatiotemporal Contrastive Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03800/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Representation Learning and Identity Adversarial Training for Facial Behavior Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11243/) (2024)
- [UAU-Net: Uncertainty-aware Representation Learning and Evidential Classification for Facial Action Unit Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21227/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

For the Facial Action Unit (AU) detection task, accurately capturing the subtle facial differences between distinct AUs is essential for reliable detection. Additionally, AU detection faces challenges from class imbalance and the presence of noisy or false labels, which undermine detection accuracy. In this paper, we introduce a novel contrastive learning framework aimed for AU detection that incorporates both self-supervised and supervised signals, thereby enhancing the learning of discriminative features for accurate AU detection. To tackle the class imbalance issue, we employ a negative sample re-weighting strategy that adjusts the step size of updating parameters for minority and majority class samples. Moreover, to address the challenges posed by noisy and false AU labels, we employ a sampling technique that encompasses three distinct types of positive sample pairs. This enables us to inject self-supervised signals into the supervised signal, effectively mitigating the adverse effects of noisy labels. Our experimental assessments, conducted on five widely-utilized benchmark datasets (BP4D, DISFA, BP4D+, GFT and Aff-Wild2), underscore the superior performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods of AU detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ziqiao-Shang/AUNCE.