Counterfactual Thinking Driven Emotion Regulation for Image Sentiment Recognition

Image sentiment recognition (ISR) facilitates the practical application of affective computing on rapidly growing social platforms. Nowadays, region-based ISR methods that use affective regions to guide emotion prediction have gained significant attention. However, existing methods lack a causality-based mechanism to guide affective region generation and effective tools to quantitatively evaluate their quality. Inspired by the psychological theory of Emotion Regulation, we propose a counterfactual thinking driven emotion regulation network (CTERNet), which simulates the Emotion Regulation Theory by modeling the entire process of ISR based on human causality-driven mechanisms. Specifically, we first use multi-scale perception for feature extraction to simulate the stage of situation selection. Next, we combine situation modification, attentional deployment, and cognitive change into a counterfactual thinking based cognitive reappraisal module, which learns both affective regions (factual) and other potential affective regions (counterfactual). In the response modulation stage, we compare the factual and counterfactual outcomes to encourage the network to discover the most emotionally representative regions, thereby quantifying the quality of affective regions for ISR tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms or matches the state-of-the-art approaches, proving its effectiveness in addressing the key challenges of region-based ISR.