  Human face exhibits an inherent hierarchy in its representations (i.e.,
holistic facial expressions can be encoded via a set of facial action units
(AUs) and their intensity). Variational (deep) auto-encoders (VAE) have shown
great results in unsupervised extraction of hierarchical latent representations
from large amounts of image data, while being robust to noise and other
undesired artifacts. Potentially, this makes VAEs a suitable approach for
learning facial features for AU intensity estimation. Yet, most existing
VAE-based methods apply classifiers learned separately from the encoded
features. By contrast, the non-parametric (probabilistic) approaches, such as
Gaussian Processes (GPs), typically outperform their parametric counterparts,
but cannot deal easily with large amounts of data. To this end, we propose a
novel VAE semi-parametric modeling framework, named DeepCoder, which combines
the modeling power of parametric (convolutional) and nonparametric (ordinal
GPs) VAEs, for joint learning of (1) latent representations at multiple levels
in a task hierarchy1, and (2) classification of multiple ordinal outputs. We
show on benchmark datasets for AU intensity estimation that the proposed
DeepCoder outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, and related VAEs and
deep learning models.
