Synthesizing Images on Perceptual Boundaries of ANNs for Uncovering Human Perceptual Variability on Facial Expressions

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Hauptverfasser: Deng, Haotian, Zhang, Chi, Wei, Chen, Liu, Quanying
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Deng, Haotian
Zhang, Chi
Wei, Chen
Liu, Quanying
author_facet Deng, Haotian
Zhang, Chi
Wei, Chen
Liu, Quanying
contents A fundamental challenge in affective cognitive science is to develop models that accurately capture the relationship between external emotional stimuli and human internal experiences. While ANNs have demonstrated remarkable accuracy in facial expression recognition, their ability to model inter-individual differences in human perception remains underexplored. This study investigates the phenomenon of high perceptual variability-where individuals exhibit significant differences in emotion categorization even when viewing the same stimulus. Inspired by the similarity between ANNs and human perception, we hypothesize that facial expression samples that are ambiguous for ANN classifiers also elicit divergent perceptual judgments among human observers. To examine this hypothesis, we introduce a novel perceptual boundary sampling method to generate facial expression stimuli that lie along ANN decision boundaries. These ambiguous samples form the basis of the varEmotion dataset, constructed through large-scale human behavioral experiments. Our analysis reveals that these ANN-confusing stimuli also provoke heightened perceptual uncertainty in human participants, highlighting shared computational principles in emotion perception. Finally, by fine-tuning ANN representations using behavioral data, we achieve alignment between ANN predictions and both group-level and individual-level human perceptual patterns. Our findings establish a systematic link between ANN decision boundaries and human perceptual variability, offering new insights into personalized modeling of emotional interpretation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_14549
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Synthesizing Images on Perceptual Boundaries of ANNs for Uncovering Human Perceptual Variability on Facial Expressions
Deng, Haotian
Zhang, Chi
Wei, Chen
Liu, Quanying
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
A fundamental challenge in affective cognitive science is to develop models that accurately capture the relationship between external emotional stimuli and human internal experiences. While ANNs have demonstrated remarkable accuracy in facial expression recognition, their ability to model inter-individual differences in human perception remains underexplored. This study investigates the phenomenon of high perceptual variability-where individuals exhibit significant differences in emotion categorization even when viewing the same stimulus. Inspired by the similarity between ANNs and human perception, we hypothesize that facial expression samples that are ambiguous for ANN classifiers also elicit divergent perceptual judgments among human observers. To examine this hypothesis, we introduce a novel perceptual boundary sampling method to generate facial expression stimuli that lie along ANN decision boundaries. These ambiguous samples form the basis of the varEmotion dataset, constructed through large-scale human behavioral experiments. Our analysis reveals that these ANN-confusing stimuli also provoke heightened perceptual uncertainty in human participants, highlighting shared computational principles in emotion perception. Finally, by fine-tuning ANN representations using behavioral data, we achieve alignment between ANN predictions and both group-level and individual-level human perceptual patterns. Our findings establish a systematic link between ANN decision boundaries and human perceptual variability, offering new insights into personalized modeling of emotional interpretation.
title Synthesizing Images on Perceptual Boundaries of ANNs for Uncovering Human Perceptual Variability on Facial Expressions
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14549