A novel Engagement Detection with Multi-Task Training (ED-MTT) system which minimizes MSE and triplet loss together to determine the engagement level of students in an e-learning environment. Please refer to our arXiv paper for further details. You can also check the colab notebook bellow for detailed explanatoins about data loading and code execution.

With the Covid-19 outbreak, the online working and learning environments became essential in our lives. For this reason, automatic analysis of non-verbal communication becomes crucial in online environments.

Engagement level is a type of social signal that can be predicted from facial expression and body pose. To this end, we propose an end-to-end deep learning-based system that detects the engagement level of the subject in an e-learning environment.

The engagement level feedback is important because:

• Make aware students of their performance in classes.
• Will help instructors to detect confusing or unclear parts of the teaching material.

The proposed system first extracts features with OpenFace, then aggregates frames in a window for calculating feature statistics as additional features. Finally, uses Bi-LSTM for generating vector embeddings from input sequences. In this system, we introduce a triplet loss as an auxiliary task and design the system as a multi-task training framework by taking inspiration from, where self-supervised contrastive learning of multi-view facial expressions was introduced. To the best of our knowledge, this is a novel approach in engagement detection literature. The key novelty of this work is the multi-task training framework using triplet loss together with Mean Squared Error (MSE). The main contributions of this paper are as follows:

• Multi-task training with triplet and MSE losses introduces an additional regularization and reduces over-fitting due to very small sample size.
• Using triplet loss mitigates the label reliability problem since it measures relative similarity between samples.
• A system with lightweight feature extraction is efficient and highly suitable for real-life applications.

We evaluate the performance of ED-MTT on a publicly available ``Engagement in The Wild'' dataset which is comprised of separated training and validation sets.

The dataset is comprised of 78 subjects (25 females and 53 males) whose ages are ranged from 19 to 27. Each subject is recorded while watching an approximately 5 minutes long stimulus video of a Korean Language lecture.

We compare the performance of ED-MTT with 9 different works from the state-of-the-art which will be reviewed in the rest of this section. Our results show that ED-MTT outperforms these state-of-the-art methods with at least a 5.74% improvement on MSE.

ED-MTT
│   README.md
│   Engagement_Labels.txt
|   ED-MTT.ipynb

└───code
│   │   dataloader.py
|   |   model.py
|   |   train.py
|   |   test.py
│   │   fix_path.py
|   |   utils.py
|   |   requirements.txt

└───configs
    │   batchnorm_default.yaml
    │   sweep.yaml

To train the experiments and manage the experiments, we used PyTorch Lightning together with Weights&Biases. All the detailed explonations to;

• Load data and pre-trained weights,
• Train the model from scratch,
• Manage expriments and hyper-parameter search with wandb,
• Reproduce the results presented in the paper,

are shown in ED-MTT.ipynb colab notebook.

If you used ED-MTT, please cite our paper using the bibTeX bellow.

@inproceedings{copur2022edmtt,
  title={Engagement Detection with Multi-Task Training in E-Learning Environments},
  author={Copur, Onur and Nakip, Mert and Scardapane, Simone and Slowack, Jurgen},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing (ICIAP 2021)},
  month = {In Press},
  year = {2022}
}