Dynamic Label Noise Suppression with Optimal Teacher Pool for Facial Expression Recognition

摘要

Due to the inherent ambiguity of facial expressions and subjectivity in dataset labeling, learning with noisy labels remains a critical challenge in facial expression recognition (FER). The supervisory mechanism of teacher-student network offers a promising approach for noisy-labeled FER. However, this approach is prone to noise accumulation and gradual coupling between the teacher and student parameters during training. We propose an Optimal Teacher Pool-driven dynamic label Noise Suppression framework for facial expression recognition (OTP-NS). Specifically, we construct an optimal teacher pool architecture that dynamically maintains multiple best teacher models while fusing their predictions, thereby mitigating noise accumulation and coupling of teacher-student parameters via update mechanisms. Furthermore, we develop two sample-level noise suppression parts: (1) Similarity-Aware Label Smoothing (SALS), diverging from the static smoothing strength in traditional label smoothing, automatically modulates the smoothing strength for teacher model based on prediction-label similarity, achieving fine-grained noise suppression. (2) Confidence-Weighted Logits (CWL), adaptively adjusting the classification loss of student model based on sample-to-centroid confidence metrics, alleviates the detrimental effects of noisy samples on model training. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across various noise levels, validating the effectiveness of our proposed framework in learning robust representations from noisy data.