AGCD-Net: Attention Guided Context Debiasing Network for Emotion Recognition

Context-aware emotion recognition (CAER) enhances affective
computing in real-world scenarios, but traditional methods often
suffer from context bias-spurious correlation between background context and emotion labels (e.g. associating “garden” with “happy”). In this paper, we propose AGCD-Net, an Attention Guided Context Debiasing model that introduces Hybrid ConvNeXt, a novel convolutional encoder that extends the ConvNeXt backbone by integrating Spatial Transformer Network and Squeeze-and-Excitation layers for enhanced feature recalibration. At the core of AGCD-Net is the Attention Guided
– Causal Intervention Module (AG-CIM), which applies causal theory, perturbs context features, isolates spurious correlations, and performs an attention-driven correction guided by face features to mitigate context bias. Experimental results on the CAER-S dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of AGCD-Net, achieving state-of-the-art performance and highlighting the importance of causal debiasing for robust emotion recognition
in complex settings.