# Causal Supervision of Attention for Affective Behaviour Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12091 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12091/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08471/) (2024)
- [Temporal Convolutional Networks for Action Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05267/) (2016)
- [Expression, Affect, Action Unit Recognition: Aff-Wild2, Multi-Task Learning and ArcFace](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04855/) (2019)
- [WebFace260M: A Benchmark Unveiling the Power of Million-Scale Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04098/) (2021)
- [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)
- [ABAW: Valence-Arousal Estimation, Expression Recognition, Action Unit Detection & Multi-Task Learning Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10659/) (2022)
- [Face Behavior a la carte: Expressions, Affect and Action Units in a Single Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11111/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Aff-Wild2: Extending the Aff-Wild Database for Affect Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07770/) (2018)
- [The 6th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19344/) (2024)
- [Distribution Matching for Multi-Task Learning of Classification Tasks: a Large-Scale Study on Faces & Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01219/) (2024)
- [7th ABAW Competition: Multi-Task Learning and Compound Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03835/) (2024)
- [MixAugment & Mixup: Augmentation Methods for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04442/) (2022)
- [FRoundation: Are Foundation Models Ready for Face Recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23831/) (2024)
- [Behaviour4All: in-the-wild Facial Behaviour Analysis Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17717/) (2024)
- [From Affect to Complex Behavior: Advancing Multimodal Human-Centered AI at the 10th ABAW Workshop & Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27451/) (2026)
- [Causal-Based Supervision of Attention in Graph Neural Network: A Better and Simpler Choice towards Powerful Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13115/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The textit11th Affective Behaviour Analysis in-the-wild Competition includes the Multi-Task Learning Challenge, where participants develop a unified framework for Valence-Arousal Estimation, Expression Recognition, and Action Unit Detection. The challenge lies in learning emotion-related representations that generalize across subjects while remaining robust to spurious factors such as identity, illumination, pose, and demographic variation. To aggregate features extracted by a pre-trained backbone into a compact representation for prediction, attention mechanisms selectively weight the most informative facial regions. However, these attention weights can still capture dataset-specific correlations rather than genuine affective cues. To address this limitation, we propose an attention pooling framework that combines causal supervision with cross-covariance regularization of attention components, encouraging subject-invariant attention and non-redundant representations that improve generalization. Our method achieves CCCVA=0.5123 for VA estimation on the official validation set, together with FEX=0.3116 and FAU=0.3974 for expression recognition and action unit detection, respectively, resulting in an overall P score (the sum of the individual task metrics) of 1.2214.