Module 4: Tutorial: Deep Learning

Neural Networks

Description of Data and Task

In this tutorial, we will reproduce the facial emotion recognition task from the slides using a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) from Hugging Face that is fine-tuned for facial emotion recognition based on image data (i.e., “dennisjooo/emotion_classification”).

Tasks

1. Setup R by installing the reticulate package (R-interface to Python) and miniconda (small Python distribution). Then install the Python packages torch and tf-keras for NNs, transformers for Transformers, and datasets for access to the Hugging Face database.

if (!('reticulate' %in% installed.packages())) {
  # Python:
  install.packages("reticulate")
  library(reticulate)
  install_miniconda()
  
  # NNs:
  reticulate::py_install('torch', pip=T)
  reticulate::py_install('tf-keras', pip=T)
  
  # Transformers:
  reticulate::py_install('transformers', pip=T)
  
  # Hugging Face:
  reticulate::py_install('datasets', pip=T)
}

2. Import the datasets Python package into your current R session using the import() function (i.e., similar to loading R packages with library()). Note that you have to save Python packages as variables (i.e., they also occur in your “Environment” in RStudio, similar to defining x = 1), and that you can only use it by calling this variable each time you want to use a function from this package using the syntax package$function() (i.e., (a) similar to the mlr3verse syntax, where models etc. are objects that have certain attributes (e.g., functions) that can be accessed with object$attribute as well as (b) similar to accessing functions from R packages without loading the entire package using the syntax package::function()).

3. Load the dataset “FastJobs/Visual_Emotional_Analysis” from Hugging Face into R and save it as “dat”. Make sure to download only the training data by calling the load_dataset() function using the argument split = 'train'.

4. Transform the Python variable “dat” into a data type that can be used in R (e.g., a tibble; Hint: If you copy the code from the slides, you should also include the part where the true numeric classes are translated to verbal labels).

5. Load the pre-trained CNN “dennisjooo/emotion_classification” as a pipeline (i.e., incl. the associated image data pre-processor with the same name/path at Hugging Face) and save it as “ppl” to be used for a facial emotion recognition task below.

6. For one randomly selected image from the dataset “dat”, use the pipleline from task 5 to predict the facial emotion. According to the model, what are the most likely and least likely emotions that the person in the image is displaying? Note that we only do this task for one of the images because it will take a while to run for the whole dataset, but feel free to play around with it as you like.

7. Bonus: Explore other pre-trained models at https://huggingface.co/models. Note that you can filter all available models by the task(s) to which they can be applied, or by the data they use. The “Model card” usually contains some useful information about how the model can be used (in Python; Hint: Use GPT to translate to R-reticulate code). Furthermore, note that since Hugging Face is open source, anyone can publish models or datasets there, so there is also a lot of crappy stuff available (e.g., a positive example is https://huggingface.co/j-hartmann/emotion-english-distilroberta-base, but a negative one is https://huggingface.co/MG31/license_aug). Pay attention to the number of likes and downloads, which are indicative of whether the model/dataset might be useful or not.