# GroupFace: Imbalanced Age Estimation Based on Multi-hop Attention Graph Convolutional Network and Group-aware Margin Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11450 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11450/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [MixHop: Higher-Order Graph Convolutional Architectures via Sparsified Neighborhood Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00067/) (2019)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [Vision GNN: An Image is Worth Graph of Nodes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00272/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Prediction: Benchmark and Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14917/) (2021)
- [Mitigate Bias in Face Recognition using Skewness-Aware Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10692/) (2019)
- [ElasticFace: Elastic Margin Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09416/) (2021)
- [Rank consistent ordinal regression for neural networks with application to age estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07884/) (2019)
- [Deep Label Distribution Learning with Label Ambiguity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01731/) (2016)
- [Nested Collaborative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15359/) (2022)
- [Multi-hop Attention Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14332/) (2020)
- [Deep Imbalanced Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06337/) (2023)
- [Moving Window Regression: A Novel Approach to Ordinal Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13122/) (2022)
- [MiVOLO: Multi-input Transformer for Age and Gender Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04616/) (2023)
- [BridgeNet: A Continuity-Aware Probabilistic Network for Age Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03358/) (2019)
- [SwinFace: A Multi-task Transformer for Face Recognition, Expression Recognition, Age Estimation and Attribute Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11509/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Multi-modal Emotion Learning with Broad State Space Models and Probability-guidance Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17858/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation from the Perspective of Graph Spectrum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17862/) (2024)
- [PML: Progressive Margin Loss for Long-tailed Age Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02140/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Multi-modal Conversational Emotion Recognition with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05735/) (2023)
- [DropMessage: Unifying Random Dropping for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10037/) (2022)
- [A Low-rank Matching Attention based Cross-modal Feature Fusion Method for Conversational Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17799/) (2023)
- [Masked Contrastive Graph Representation Learning for Age Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17798/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [LRA-GNN: Latent Relation-Aware Graph Neural Network with Initial and Dynamic Residual for Facial Age Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05423/) (2025)
- [Overcoming Occlusions in the Wild: A Multi-Task Age Head Approach to Age Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13445/) (2025)
- [SE-GNN: Seed Expanded-Aware Graph Neural Network with Iterative Optimization for Semi-supervised Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20801/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the recent advances in computer vision, age estimation has significantly improved in overall accuracy. However, owing to the most common methods do not take into account the class imbalance problem in age estimation datasets, they suffer from a large bias in recognizing long-tailed groups. To achieve high-quality imbalanced learning in long-tailed groups, the dominant solution lies in that the feature extractor learns the discriminative features of different groups and the classifier is able to provide appropriate and unbiased margins for different groups by the discriminative features. Therefore, in this novel, we propose an innovative collaborative learning framework (GroupFace) that integrates a multi-hop attention graph convolutional network and a dynamic group-aware margin strategy based on reinforcement learning. Specifically, to extract the discriminative features of different groups, we design an enhanced multi-hop attention graph convolutional network. This network is capable of capturing the interactions of neighboring nodes at different distances, fusing local and global information to model facial deep aging, and exploring diverse representations of different groups. In addition, to further address the class imbalance problem, we design a dynamic group-aware margin strategy based on reinforcement learning to provide appropriate and unbiased margins for different groups. The strategy divides the sample into four age groups and considers identifying the optimum margins for various age groups by employing a Markov decision process. Under the guidance of the agent, the feature representation bias and the classification margin deviation between different groups can be reduced simultaneously, balancing inter-class separability and intra-class proximity. After joint optimization, our architecture achieves excellent performance on several age estimation benchmark datasets.