Context-Aware Emotion Recognition (CAER) is a crucial and challenging task
that aims to perceive the emotional states of the target person with contextual
information. Recent approaches invariably focus on designing sophisticated
architectures or mechanisms to extract seemingly meaningful representations
from subjects and contexts. However, a long-overlooked issue is that a context
bias in existing datasets leads to a significantly unbalanced distribution of
emotional states among different context scenarios. Concretely, the harmful
bias is a confounder that misleads existing models to learn spurious
correlations based on conventional likelihood estimation, significantly
limiting the models' performance. To tackle the issue, this paper provides a
causality-based perspective to disentangle the models from the impact of such
bias, and formulate the causalities among variables in the CAER task via a
tailored causal graph. Then, we propose a Contextual Causal Intervention Module
(CCIM) based on the backdoor adjustment to de-confound the confounder and
exploit the true causal effect for model training. CCIM is plug-in and
model-agnostic, which improves diverse state-of-the-art approaches by
considerable margins. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets
demonstrate the effectiveness of our CCIM and the significance of causal
insight.

本文提供了基于因果关系的视角来解决 “上下文感知情感识别（CAER）” 中的数据集中存在的偏见问题。通过构建因果图，设计了 Contextual Causal Intervention Module (CCIM) 来提高模型表现并且在三个基准数据集上进行了充分的实验来证明其有效性和重要性。