# AGCD-Net: Attention Guided Context Debiasing Network for Emotion Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09248 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09248/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [DFEW: A Large-Scale Database for Recognizing Dynamic Facial Expressions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05924/) (2020)
- [Context-Aware Emotion Recognition Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05913/) (2019)
- [Context Based Emotion Recognition using EMOTIC Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13401/) (2020)
- [Factorized Higher-Order CNNs with an Application to Spatio-Temporal Emotion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06196/) (2019)
- [Robust Emotion Recognition in Context Debiasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05963/) (2024)
- [Global-Local Attention for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04129/) (2021)
- [Towards Context-Aware Emotion Recognition Debiasing from a Causal Demystification Perspective via De-confounded Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04963/) (2024)
- [EmoNeXt: an Adapted ConvNeXt for Facial Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08199/) (2025)
- [Multi-face emotion detection for effective Human-Robot Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07213/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Context-aware emotion recognition (CAER) enhances affective computing in real-world scenarios, but traditional methods often suffer from context bias-spurious correlation between background context and emotion labels (e.g. associating ``garden'' with ``happy''). In this paper, we propose AGCD-Net, an Attention Guided Context Debiasing model that introduces textitHybrid ConvNeXt, a novel convolutional encoder that extends the ConvNeXt backbone by integrating Spatial Transformer Network and Squeeze-and-Excitation layers for enhanced feature recalibration. At the core of AGCD-Net is the Attention Guided - Causal Intervention Module (AG-CIM), which applies causal theory, perturbs context features, isolates spurious correlations, and performs an attention-driven correction guided by face features to mitigate context bias. Experimental results on the CAER-S dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of AGCD-Net, achieving state-of-the-art performance and highlighting the importance of causal debiasing for robust emotion recognition in complex settings.