When Simplicity Wins: Bottleneck-Aware Context Modeling for Lightweight Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation demands a careful balance between accuracy, efficiency, and scalability, which remains difficult to achieve for high-resolution imagery. Convolutional networks effectively model local patterns but struggle with long-range dependencies, whereas Vision Transformers capture global context at a high computational cost. While recent work largely focuses on encoder design, the bottleneck stage, central to contextual aggregation and information flow, has been relatively overlooked. We propose SiConMo, a lightweight yet effective framework, implemented in two variants: an RGB-only model (SiConMo) and a GME-enhanced variant (SiConMo$_\dagger$). We show that simplicity arises from a key design principle: at very low computational budgets, the bottleneck is the most efficient stage to integrate local and global context. SiConMo integrates three complementary components: a Token Pyramid Extraction Module for hierarchical multi-scale representation, a Transformer-Branched Depthwise Convolution block for bottleneck-aware context modeling, and a Feature Merging Module that preserves spatial structure while enhancing semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on ADE20K, PASCAL Context, Cityscapes, and COCO-Stuff demonstrate that SiConMo achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy-efficiency trade-off among lightweight semantic segmentation models, highlighting simplicity as a powerful design principle.

Context-Aware Mixture of Domain Experts for Bodily Expression of Emotion in the Wild

The same body posture can convey entirely different emotions depending on its surrounding context, yet most methods for recognising bodily emotions treat scene and object cues as auxiliary feature augmentations rather than as structured priors over the plausibility of emotions. We introduce the Context-Aware Mixture of Domain Experts (CA-MoDE) for bodily emotion recognition. CA-MoDE incorporates dedicated scene and object experts to generate soft distributions over emotion categories conditioned on their respective domains. These domain-conditioned soft predictions serve as structured contextual priors that modulate the body expert's predictions at the distributional level rather than at the feature level. To fuse these multi-domain signals, we propose a task-tailored max-endorsement gating strategy that selects the strongest contextual signal across experts for each emotion dimension. Our gating strategy mitigates the signal dilution that typically occurs when conflicting or uninformative context distributions are averaged. CA-MoDE achieves an Emotion Recognition Score of 0.3269 on the Body Language Database. By outperforming existing temporal models using only single still images, our framework demonstrates that explicitly modelling structured spatial context can serve as a complementary discriminative proxy for the behavioural dynamics typically captured by video.

A Controlled Study of CLIP-Based Body-Scene Fusion for Emotion Recognition in Context

Apparent emotion in natural images is often not visible from the face alone. The face may be small, hidden, or neutral, while posture and scene context carry much of the evidence. This work studies context-aware emotion recognition on EMOTIC with an image-only two-stream model. A ResNet-18 body stream encodes the target-person crop, and a CLIP ViT-B/16 scene stream encodes the full image. The fused feature predicts 26 categorical emotion labels and the continuous valence, arousal, and dominance values. This study examines whether small context-debiasing or rare-class training changes still help after adding a CLIP scene encoder. The clean two-stream model is compared with simplified CCIM-style intervention, CLEF-lite context-bias subtraction, ASL tuning, and class-balanced sampling under the same implementation pipeline. No tested variant improves over the clean two-stream model, which achieves 34.52% mAP on the EMOTIC test split. CLIP gives the model broad scene semantics, but the simplified causal, counterfactual, and rare-class changes do not automatically improve performance. Most remaining errors are in rare and subtle emotion categories, so the next step should focus on label relationships and finer subject-context interaction.