cs.CVOct 23, 2026

An Error Budget for Shuffled Multimodal Windows in the 3rd WEAR Challenge: Stacking, Count Constraints and Seam Matching

Authors: Soheil Kooklan

Organizations: Independent Researcher

Abstract

The 3rd WEAR Dataset Challenge asks for an activity label for every one-second window of four unseen participants. Each window has 15 VideoMAEv2 frame embeddings, the accelerometer signal of one random limb, and the windows are shuffled. This report is an empirical analysis of one system built after the challenge deadline. Window classifiers are stacked with features averaged over per-participant graphs of video neighbours and scored successor candidates, and a mean-field style decoder with a soft count constraint per activity labels all windows of a participant together. The setting is offline and transductive, and the count constraint relies on each activity being performed once. In a participant-wise simulation with participant-level bootstrap intervals, stacking added 0.051 macro F1 over stage-1 fusion and the count constraint 0.011 (95% interval 0.006 to 0.017). A quadratic seam distance ranks the true same-limb successor first among about 720 candidates in 83.9% of cases, but adding it to the link model changed macro F1 by -0.0001 (-0.0006 to 0.0005). With the decoder settings and the mixing weight chosen inside the folds and the mislabelled spans left out of training, the system scores 0.936 in simulation (0.940 for participants who performed each activity once); the submitted configuration scores 0.938 (0.943). Per-participant scores range from 0.80 to 0.97. These results come from a non-nested stacking protocol that uses unlabelled features transductively, so they are not a fully inductive estimate. An oracle that averages the final unary scores over the true segments reaches 0.973, and 79% of the remaining errors involve the null class. On the private leaderboard, which no choice used, the selected Kaggle submission scored 0.9231 (public 0.9254, with bounds partly tuned there), and a later one with bounds chosen in simulation scored 0.9247 (public 0.9253).

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables3 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

May 4, 2026

HARMES: A Multi-Modal Dataset for Wearable Human Activity Recognition with Motion, Environmental Sensing and Sound

With each sensing modality exhibiting inherent strengths and limitations, multi-modal approaches for wearable Human Activity Recognition (HAR) are becoming increasingly relevant -- particularly for recognizing Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), where individual modalities often produce ambiguous signals for similar or complex activities. This work introduces HARMES, a multi-modal wearable dataset combining three wrist-recorded modalities: motion sensing via an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), atmospheric environmental sensors (humidity, temperature, and pressure), and audio. Collected from 20 participants performing household activities in their own homes, HARMES totals over 80 hours of recorded data, with approximately three hours of labeled activity data per participant across 15 ADL classes. To the best of our knowledge, HARMES is the first dataset to combine this particular sensor trio, and it is nearly six times larger than the previously largest wrist-inertial-acoustic HAR dataset. In an extensive benchmark, we evaluate cross-subject generalization and conduct an ablation study revealing that modality contributions are activity-dependent and can provide complementary value, particularly for activities that are ambiguous from motion data alone. HARMES is freely available at Zenodo, alongside example code for loading the dataset and training models on GitHub.
Aug 19, 2026

When Clean Signals Are Not Enough: Detecting Structural Ambiguity for Safe Wearable Stress Classification

Wearable stress classifiers can achieve strong average performance while failing completely for a particular individual. On WESAD, a Random Forest reaches 93.0% mean accuracy yet yields F1 = 0 for Subject 14, whose cross-signal coupling weakens near stress onset. We call this structural ambiguity: individually plausible physiological channels form an inter-signal pattern that is poorly supported by the person's non-stress reference. We introduce the Individual Conformal Coupling Monitor (ICCM), a lightweight and transparent pre-inference monitor that quantifies subject-specific coupling divergence and routes each window to classify, defer, or abstain without retraining the downstream classifier. Across WESAD (N = 15) and Stress-Predict (N = 35), full-cohort Pearson associations between ambiguity and accuracy are negative (r = -0.607, p = 0.016; r = -0.412, p = 0.014). Robustness analyses temper this finding: rank correlations are not significant, and the WESAD association disappears when Subject 14 is removed. ICCM changes false-positive counts from 29 to 27 and 94 to 92, although neither paired change is significant. It withholds 3 of Subject 14's 21 stress windows but does not repair the missed-stress failure. These results position ICCM as an interpretable signal of unsupported physiology and individual failure, rather than a stand-alone safety guarantee.
May 21, 2026

Two-Stage Multimodal Framework for Emotion Mimicry Intensity Prediction

We present our submission to the Hume-ABAW10 Emotional Mimicry Intensity (EMI) Challenge, which aims to predict six continuous emotion intensity dimensions: Admiration, Amusement, Determination, Empathic Pain, Excitement, and Joy, from in-the-wild multimodal video clips. We propose a staged multimodal framework that combines textual, acoustic, and visual representations, with an optional motion branch. Our approach first trains modality-specific encoders independently and then fuses their learned representations through a lightweight regressor with modality dropout and controlled encoder adaptation. Across our submitted systems, the best validation performance is obtained by the text--audio--vision--motion fusion model under the expanded 4:1 split, achieving an average Pearson correlation of 0.4722. Although the motion branch yields only very slight gains, its behavior can be interesting to study. Our team was placed third in the EMI challenge, achieving an average Pearson correlation of 0.57 for the test set. Overall, we provide a practical and reproducible baseline for EMI prediction.