Author profiling, the analysis of texts to uncover attributes such as gender and age of the author, has become essential with the widespread use of social media platforms. This paper focuses on author profiling in the Bangla language, aiming to extract valuable insights about anonymous authors based on their writing style on social media. The primary objective is to introduce and benchmark the performance of machine learning approaches on a newly created Bangla Author Profiling dataset, BN-AuthProf. The dataset comprises 30,131 social media posts from 300 authors, labeled by their age and gender. Authors' identities and sensitive information were anonymized to ensure privacy. Various classical machine learning and deep learning techniques were employed to evaluate the dataset. For gender classification, the best accuracy achieved was 80% using Support Vector Machine (SVM), while a Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB) classifier achieved the best F1 score of 0.756. For age classification, MNB attained a maximum accuracy score of 91% with an F1 score of 0.905. This research highlights the effectiveness of machine learning in gender and age classification for Bangla author profiling, with practical implications spanning marketing, security, forensic linguistics, education, and criminal investigations, considering privacy and biases.
The advancements in computer vision and image processing techniques have led to emergence of new application in the domain of visual surveillance, targeted advertisement, content-based searching, and human-computer interaction etc. Out of the various techniques in computer vision, face analysis, in particular, has gained much attention. Several previous studies have tried to explore different applications of facial feature processing for a variety of tasks, including age and gender classification. However, despite several previous studies having explored the problem, the age and gender classification of in-wild human faces is still far from the achieving the desired levels of accuracy required for real-world applications. This paper, therefore, attempts to bridge this gap by proposing a hybrid model that combines self-attention and BiLSTM approaches for age and gender classification problems. The proposed models performance is compared with several state-of-the-art model proposed so far. An improvement of approximately 10percent and 6percent over the state-of-the-art implementations for age and gender classification, respectively, are noted for the proposed model. The proposed model is thus found to achieve superior performance and is found to provide a more generalized learning. The model can, therefore, be applied as a core classification component in various image processing and computer vision problems.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently gained immense popularity. Powerful commercial models like ChatGPT-4V and Gemini, as well as open-source ones such as LLaVA, are essentially general-purpose models and are applied to solve a wide variety of tasks, including those in computer vision. These neural networks possess such strong general knowledge and reasoning abilities that they have proven capable of working even on tasks for which they were not specifically trained. We compared the capabilities of the most powerful MLLMs to date: ShareGPT4V, ChatGPT, LLaVA-Next in a specialized task of age and gender estimation with our state-of-the-art specialized model, MiVOLO. We also updated MiVOLO and provide details and new metrics in this article. This comparison has yielded some interesting results and insights about the strengths and weaknesses of the participating models. Furthermore, we attempted various ways to fine-tune the ShareGPT4V model for this specific task, aiming to achieve state-of-the-art results in this particular challenge. Although such a model would not be practical in production, as it is incredibly expensive compared to a specialized model like MiVOLO, it could be very useful in some tasks, like data annotation.
Age and gender recognition in the wild is a highly challenging task: apart from the variability of conditions, pose complexities, and varying image quality, there are cases where the face is partially or completely occluded. We present MiVOLO (Multi Input VOLO), a straightforward approach for age and gender estimation using the latest vision transformer. Our method integrates both tasks into a unified dual input/output model, leveraging not only facial information but also person image data. This improves the generalization ability of our model and enables it to deliver satisfactory results even when the face is not visible in the image. To evaluate our proposed model, we conduct experiments on four popular benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art performance, while demonstrating real-time processing capabilities. Additionally, we introduce a novel benchmark based on images from the Open Images Dataset. The ground truth annotations for this benchmark have been meticulously generated by human annotators, resulting in high accuracy answers due to the smart aggregation of votes. Furthermore, we compare our model's age recognition performance with human-level accuracy and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms humans across a majority of age ranges. Finally, we grant public access to our models, along with the code for validation and inference. In addition, we provide extra annotations for used datasets and introduce our new benchmark.
A novel ordinal regression algorithm, called moving window regression (MWR), is proposed in this paper. First, we propose the notion of relative rank ($\rho$-rank), which is a new order representation scheme for input and reference instances. Second, we develop global and local relative regressors ($\rho$-regressors) to predict $\rho$-ranks within entire and specific rank ranges, respectively. Third, we refine an initial rank estimate iteratively by selecting two reference instances to form a search window and then estimating the $\rho$-rank within the window. Extensive experiments results show that the proposed algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art performances on various benchmark datasets for facial age estimation and historical color image classification. The codes are available at https://github.com/nhshin-mcl/MWR.
The characterisation of the brain as a functional network in which the connections between brain regions are represented by correlation values across time series has been very popular in the last years. Although this representation has advanced our understanding of brain function, it represents a simplified model of brain connectivity that has a complex dynamic spatio-temporal nature. Oversimplification of the data may hinder the merits of applying advanced non-linear feature extraction algorithms. To this end, we propose a dynamic adaptive spatio-temporal graph convolution (DAST-GCN) model to overcome the shortcomings of pre-defined static correlation-based graph structures. The proposed approach allows end-to-end inference of dynamic connections between brain regions via layer-wise graph structure learning module while mapping brain connectivity to a phenotype in a supervised learning framework. This leverages the computational power of the model, data and targets to represent brain connectivity, and could enable the identification of potential biomarkers for the supervised target in question. We evaluate our pipeline on the UKBiobank dataset for age and gender classification tasks from resting-state functional scans and show that it outperforms currently adapted linear and non-linear methods in neuroimaging. Further, we assess the generalizability of the inferred graph structure by transferring the pre-trained graph to an independent dataset for the same task. Our results demonstrate the task-robustness of the graph against different scanning parameters and demographics.
A multilayer perceptron (MLP) is typically made of multiple fully connected layers with nonlinear activation functions. There have been several approaches to make them better (e.g. faster convergence, better convergence limit, etc.). But the researches lack structured ways to test them. We test different MLP architectures by carrying out the experiments on the age and gender datasets. We empirically show that by whitening inputs before every linear layer and adding skip connections, our proposed MLP architecture can result in better performance. Since the whitening process includes dropouts, it can also be used to approximate Bayesian inference. We have open sourced our code, and released models and docker images at https://github.com/tae898/age-gender/
This paper introduces a novel dataset to help researchers evaluate their computer vision and audio models for accuracy across a diverse set of age, genders, apparent skin tones and ambient lighting conditions. Our dataset is composed of 3,011 subjects and contains over 45,000 videos, with an average of 15 videos per person. The videos were recorded in multiple U.S. states with a diverse set of adults in various age, gender and apparent skin tone groups. A key feature is that each subject agreed to participate for their likenesses to be used. Additionally, our age and gender annotations are provided by the subjects themselves. A group of trained annotators labeled the subjects' apparent skin tone using the Fitzpatrick skin type scale. Moreover, annotations for videos recorded in low ambient lighting are also provided. As an application to measure robustness of predictions across certain attributes, we provide a comprehensive study on the top five winners of the DeepFake Detection Challenge (DFDC). Experimental evaluation shows that the winning models are less performant on some specific groups of people, such as subjects with darker skin tones and thus may not generalize to all people. In addition, we also evaluate the state-of-the-art apparent age and gender classification methods. Our experiments provides a thorough analysis on these models in terms of fair treatment of people from various backgrounds.
Uncertainty is the only certainty there is. Modeling data uncertainty is essential for regression, especially in unconstrained settings. Traditionally the direct regression formulation is considered and the uncertainty is modeled by modifying the output space to a certain family of probabilistic distributions. On the other hand, classification based regression and ranking based solutions are more popular in practice while the direct regression methods suffer from the limited performance. How to model the uncertainty within the present-day technologies for regression remains an open issue. In this paper, we propose to learn probabilistic ordinal embeddings which represent each data as a multivariate Gaussian distribution rather than a deterministic point in the latent space. An ordinal distribution constraint is proposed to exploit the ordinal nature of regression. Our probabilistic ordinal embeddings can be integrated into popular regression approaches and empower them with the ability of uncertainty estimation. Experimental results show that our approach achieves competitive performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Li-Wanhua/POEs.
It is often desired that ordinal regression models yield unimodal predictions. However, in many recent works this characteristic is either absent, or implemented using soft targets, which do not guarantee unimodal outputs at inference. In addition, we argue that the standard maximum likelihood objective is not suitable for ordinal regression problems, and that optimal transport is better suited for this task, as it naturally captures the order of the classes. In this work, we propose a framework for deep ordinal regression, based on unimodal output distribution and optimal transport loss. Inspired by the well-known Proportional Odds model, we propose to modify its design by using an architectural mechanism which guarantees that the model output distribution will be unimodal. We empirically analyze the different components of our proposed approach and demonstrate their contribution to the performance of the model. Experimental results on eight real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach consistently performs on par with and often better than several recently proposed deep learning approaches for deep ordinal regression with unimodal output probabilities, while having guarantee on the output unimodality. In addition, we demonstrate that proposed approach is less overconfident than current baselines.
Simultaneously running multiple modules is a key requirement for a smart multimedia system for facial applications including face recognition, facial expression understanding, and gender identification. To effectively integrate them, a continual learning approach to learn new tasks without forgetting is introduced. Unlike previous methods growing monotonically in size, our approach maintains the compactness in continual learning. The proposed packing-and-expanding method is effective and easy to implement, which can iteratively shrink and enlarge the model to integrate new functions. Our integrated multitask model can achieve similar accuracy with only 39.9% of the original size.
Continual lifelong learning is essential to many applications. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective approach to continual deep learning. Our approach leverages the principles of deep model compression, critical weights selection, and progressive networks expansion. By enforcing their integration in an iterative manner, we introduce an incremental learning method that is scalable to the number of sequential tasks in a continual learning process. Our approach is easy to implement and owns several favorable characteristics. First, it can avoid forgetting (i.e., learn new tasks while remembering all previous tasks). Second, it allows model expansion but can maintain the model compactness when handling sequential tasks. Besides, through our compaction and selection/expansion mechanism, we show that the knowledge accumulated through learning previous tasks is helpful to build a better model for the new tasks compared to training the models independently with tasks. Experimental results show that our approach can incrementally learn a deep model tackling multiple tasks without forgetting, while the model compactness is maintained with the performance more satisfiable than individual task training.
In this paper, we present multimodal deep neural network frameworks for age and gender classification, which take input a profile face image as well as an ear image. Our main objective is to enhance the accuracy of soft biometric trait extraction from profile face images by additionally utilizing a promising biometric modality: ear appearance. For this purpose, we provided end-to-end multimodal deep learning frameworks. We explored different multimodal strategies by employing data, feature, and score level fusion. To increase representation and discrimination capability of the deep neural networks, we benefited from domain adaptation and employed center loss besides softmax loss. We conducted extensive experiments on the UND-F, UND-J2, and FERET datasets. Experimental results indicated that profile face images contain a rich source of information for age and gender classification. We found that the presented multimodal system achieves very high age and gender classification accuracies. Moreover, we attained superior results compared to the state-of-the-art profile face image or ear image-based age and gender classification methods.
In many real-world prediction tasks, class labels include information about the relative ordering between labels, which is not captured by commonly-used loss functions such as multi-category cross-entropy. Recently, the deep learning community adopted ordinal regression frameworks to take such ordering information into account. Neural networks were equipped with ordinal regression capabilities by transforming ordinal targets into binary classification subtasks. However, this method suffers from inconsistencies among the different binary classifiers. To resolve these inconsistencies, we propose the COnsistent RAnk Logits (CORAL) framework with strong theoretical guarantees for rank-monotonicity and consistent confidence scores. Moreover, the proposed method is architecture-agnostic and can extend arbitrary state-of-the-art deep neural network classifiers for ordinal regression tasks. The empirical evaluation of the proposed rank-consistent method on a range of face-image datasets for age prediction shows a substantial reduction of the prediction error compared to the reference ordinal regression network.
Generally, facial age variations affect gender classification accuracy significantly, because facial shape and skin texture change as they grow old. This requires re-examination on the gender classification system to consider facial age information. In this paper, we propose Multi-expert Gender Classification on Age Group (MGA), an end-to-end multi-task learning schemes of age estimation and gender classification. First, two types of deep neural networks are utilized; Convolutional Appearance Network (CAN) for facial appearance feature and Deep Geometry Network (DGN) for facial geometric feature. Then, CAN and DGN are integrated by the proposed model integration strategy and fine-tuned in order to improve age and gender classification accuracy. The facial images are categorized into one of three age groups (young, adult and elder group) based on their estimated age, and the system makes a gender prediction according to average fusion strategy of three gender classification experts, which are trained to fit gender characteristics of each age group. Rigorous experimental results conducted on the challenging databases suggest that the proposed MGA outperforms several state-of-art researches with smaller computational cost.
Age and gender are complementary soft biometric traits for face recognition. Successful estimation of age and gender from facial images taken under real-world conditions can contribute improving the identification results in the wild. In this study, in order to achieve robust age and gender classification in the wild, we have benefited from Deep Convolutional Neural Networks based representation. We have explored transferability of existing deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models for age and gender classification. The generic AlexNet-like architecture and domain specific VGG-Face CNN model are employed and fine-tuned with the Adience dataset prepared for age and gender classification in uncontrolled environments. In addition, task specific GilNet CNN model has also been utilized and used as a baseline method in order to compare with transferred models. Experimental results show that both transferred deep CNN models outperform the GilNet CNN model, which is the state-of-the-art age and gender classification approach on the Adience dataset, by an absolute increase of 7% and 4.5% in accuracy, respectively. This outcome indicates that transferring a deep CNN model can provide better classification performance than a task specific CNN model, which has a limited number of layers and trained from scratch using a limited amount of data as in the case of GilNet. Domain specific VGG-Face CNN model has been found to be more useful and provided better performance for both age and gender classification tasks, when compared with generic AlexNet-like model, which shows that transfering from a closer domain is more useful.
Currently there are two predominant ways to train deep neural networks. The first one uses restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) and the second one autoencoders. RBMs are stacked in layers to form deep belief network (DBN); the final representation layer is attached to the target to complete the deep neural network. Autoencoders are nested one inside the other to form stacked autoencoders; once the stcaked autoencoder is learnt the decoder portion is detached and the target attached to the deepest layer of the encoder to form the deep neural network. This work proposes a new approach to train deep neural networks using dictionary learning as the basic building block; the idea is to use the features from the shallower layer as inputs for training the next deeper layer. One can use any type of dictionary learning (unsupervised, supervised, discriminative etc.) as basic units till the pre-final layer. In the final layer one needs to use the label consistent dictionary learning formulation for classification. We compare our proposed framework with existing state-of-the-art deep learning techniques on benchmark problems; we are always within the top 10 results. In actual problems of age and gender classification, we are better than the best known techniques.
Local deep neural networks have been recently introduced for gender recognition. Although, they achieve very good performance they are very computationally expensive to train. In this work, we introduce a simplified version of local deep neural networks which significantly reduces the training time. Instead of using hundreds of patches per image, as suggested by the original method, we propose to use 9 overlapping patches per image which cover the entire face region. This results in a much reduced training time, since just 9 patches are extracted per image instead of hundreds, at the expense of a slightly reduced performance. We tested the proposed modified local deep neural networks approach on the LFW and Adience databases for the task of gender and age classification. For both tasks and both databases the performance is up to 1% lower compared to the original version of the algorithm. We have also investigated which patches are more discriminative for age and gender classification. It turns out that the mouth and eyes regions are useful for age classification, whereas just the eye region is useful for gender classification.
Recently, deep neural networks have demonstrated excellent performances in recognizing the age and gender on human face images. However, these models were applied in a black-box manner with no information provided about which facial features are actually used for prediction and how these features depend on image preprocessing, model initialization and architecture choice. We present a study investigating these different effects. In detail, our work compares four popular neural network architectures, studies the effect of pretraining, evaluates the robustness of the considered alignment preprocessings via cross-method test set swapping and intuitively visualizes the model's prediction strategies in given preprocessing conditions using the recent Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) algorithm. Our evaluations on the challenging Adience benchmark show that suitable parameter initialization leads to a holistic perception of the input, compensating artefactual data representations. With a combination of simple preprocessing steps, we reach state of the art performance in gender recognition.
Automatically predicting age group and gender from face images acquired in unconstrained conditions is an important and challenging task in many real-world applications. Nevertheless, the conventional methods with manually-designed features on in-the-wild benchmarks are unsatisfactory because of incompetency to tackle large variations in unconstrained images. This difficulty is alleviated to some degree through Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for its powerful feature representation. In this paper, we propose a new CNN based method for age group and gender estimation leveraging Residual Networks of Residual Networks (RoR), which exhibits better optimization ability for age group and gender classification than other CNN architectures.Moreover, two modest mechanisms based on observation of the characteristics of age group are presented to further improve the performance of age estimation.In order to further improve the performance and alleviate over-fitting problem, RoR model is pre-trained on ImageNet firstly, and then it is fune-tuned on the IMDB-WIKI-101 data set for further learning the features of face images, finally, it is used to fine-tune on Adience data set. Our experiments illustrate the effectiveness of RoR method for age and gender estimation in the wild, where it achieves better performance than other CNN methods. Finally, the RoR-152+IMDB-WIKI-101 with two mechanisms achieves new state-of-the-art results on Adience benchmark.