Relevance-Based Data Masking: A Model-Agnostic Transfer Learning Approach for Facial Expression Recognition

Deep learning approaches are now a popular choice in the field of automatic emotion recognition (AER) across various modalities. Due to the high costs of manually labeling human emotions however, the amount of available training data is relatively scarce in comparison to other tasks. To facilitate the learning process and reduce the necessary amount of training-data, modern approaches therefore often rely on leveraging knowledge from models that have already been trained on related tasks where data is available abundantly. In this work we introduce a novel approach to transfer learning, which addresses two shortcomings of traditional methods: The (partial) inheritance of the original models structure and the restriction to other neural network models as an input source. To this end we identify the parts in the input that have been relevant for the decision of the model we want to transfer knowledge from, and directly encode those relevant regions in the data on which we train our new model. To validate our approach we performed experiments on well-established datasets for the task of automatic facial expression recognition. The results of those experiments are suggesting that our approach helps to accelerate the learning process.