Transformer-Driven Modeling of Variable Frequency Features for Classifying Student Engagement in Online Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces EngageFormer, a transformer-based model that effectively classifies student engagement in online learning using video data, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on multiple datasets.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel transformer architecture with sequence pooling for engagement classification, demonstrating superior performance on diverse affective state datasets.

Findings

Achieved up to 99.16% accuracy on BAUM-1 dataset.

State-of-the-art results on DAiSEE and YawDD datasets.

Provides a baseline for future engagement classification research.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and the internet's availability have recently boosted online learning. However, monitoring engagement in online learning is a difficult task for teachers. In this context, timely automatic student engagement classification can help teachers in making adaptive adjustments to meet students' needs. This paper proposes EngageFormer, a transformer based architecture with sequence pooling using video modality for engagement classification. The proposed architecture computes three views from the input video and processes them in parallel using transformer encoders; the global encoder then processes the representation from each encoder, and finally, multi layer perceptron (MLP) predicts the engagement level. A learning centered affective state dataset is curated from existing open source databases. The proposed method achieved an accuracy of 63.9%, 56.73%, 99.16%, 65.67%, and 74.89% on Dataset for Affective States in E-Environments (DAiSEE), Bahcesehir University Multimodal Affective Database-1 (BAUM-1), Yawning Detection Dataset (YawDD), University of Texas at Arlington Real-Life Drowsiness Dataset (UTA-RLDD), and curated learning-centered affective state dataset respectively. The achieved results on the BAUM-1, DAiSEE, and YawDD datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, indicating the superiority of the proposed model in accurately classifying affective states on these datasets. Additionally, the results obtained on the UTA-RLDD dataset, which involves two-class classification, serve as a baseline for future research. These results provide a foundation for further investigations and serve as a point of reference for future works to compare and improve upon.