Learning from Annotation Uncertainty: Entropy-Aware Curriculum for Speech Emotion Recognition
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Computer Science > Sound
Title:Learning from Annotation Uncertainty: Entropy-Aware Curriculum for Speech Emotion Recognition
Abstract:Speech emotion recognition (SER) often relies on hard consensus labels that collapse annotator disagreement. We study distribution-based supervision for 9-class SER on MSP-Podcast 2.0 using a WavLM-Base multitask model for categorical emotion and dimensional VAD. Hard-label training is compared with targets from primary and merged primary--secondary annotator vote distributions. Distributional objectives improve alignment with human vote distributions, reducing JSD/KLD relative to hard-label training. Analysis shows that hard supervision partly benefits from assigning ambiguous utterances to the residual Other class, whereas distributional supervision redistributes uncertainty across emotion categories. Entropy-stratified evaluation shows that high-ambiguity utterances remain challenging, but distribution-based supervision better captures perceptual uncertainty. These findings support moving beyond hard labels toward targets that reflect listener disagreement.
| Comments: | 5 pages, 3 figures. Accepted to Interspeech 2026 |
| Subjects: | Sound (cs.SD); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.27536 [cs.SD] |
| (or arXiv:2606.27536v1 [cs.SD] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.27536
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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