Disentangled-Multimodal Privileged Knowledge Distillation for Depression Recognition with Incomplete Multimodal Data

Depression recognition (DR) using facial images, audio signals, or language text recordings has achieved remarkable performance. Recently, multimodal DR has shown improved performance over single-modal methods by leveraging information from a combination of these modalities. However, collecting high-quality data containing all modalities poses a challenge. In particular, these methods often encounter performance degradation when certain modalities are either missing or degraded. To tackle this issue, we present a generalizable multimodal framework for DR by aggregating feature disentanglement and privileged knowledge distillation. In detail, our approach aims to disentangle homogeneous and heterogeneous features within multimodal signals while suppressing noise, thereby adaptively aggregating the most informative components for high-quality DR. Subsequently, we leverage knowledge distillation to transfer privileged knowledge from complete modalities to the observed input with limited information, thereby significantly improving the tolerance and compatibility. These strategies form our novel Feature Disentanglement and Privileged knowledge Distillation Network for DR, dubbed Dis2DR. Experimental evaluations on AVEC 2013, AVEC 2014, AVEC 2017, and AVEC 2019 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our Dis2DR method. Remarkably, Dis2DR achieves superior performance even when only a single modality is available, surpassing existing state-of-the-art multimodal DR approaches AVA-DepressNet by up to 9.8% on the AVEC 2013 dataset.