---
license: mit
library_name: pytorch
tags:
  - computer-vision
  - affective-computing
  - neuroscience
  - image-regression
  - vgg16
  - pavlovian-conditioning
  - valence-prediction
---

# Visual-Valence Model (VCA)

> A deep neural network model of associative emotional (Pavlovian fear) learning.

Companion model repository for **["Associative Emotional Learning in Convolutional Neural Networks"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19327)**
(Leem, Keil, Ding & Fang; *Neural Computation*, in press).

- 📄 Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19327
- 💻 Code: https://github.com/lab-smile/FearConditioningAI

> **Note:** This model is a research artifact for computational/cognitive neuroscience, released to
> reproduce and extend the paper's findings. It is **not** a general-purpose sentiment/emotion API and
> is not validated for clinical, diagnostic, or production affective-computing use.

---

## Model description

The Visual-Valence Model predicts the affective **valence** of a visual scene (1 = extreme displeasure,
9 = extreme pleasure) and reproduces hallmarks of Pavlovian (fear) conditioning when a novel, initially
neutral stimulus is repeatedly paired with an emotionally-charged one.

The architecture (`Visual_Cortex_Amygdala` in [`models/VGG_Model.py`](https://github.com/lab-smile/FearConditioningAI/blob/main/models/VGG_Model.py))
has three components, loosely modeling the primate visual/affective pathway:

| Component | Role | Implementation |
|---|---|---|
| **Visual Cortex module** ("High Road") | Ventral visual stream | VGG-16 (Simonyan & Zisserman, 2015), ImageNet-pretrained, **frozen** |
| **Shortcut Pathway** ("Middle Road") | Fast, low-resolution route from early vision to affect circuitry | Multi-scale pooling of VGG-16's early layers (layer index 10), combined via an Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) module (Wang et al., 2020) |
| **Valence Module** | Combines both pathways into a scalar valence judgment | Two fully-connected layers (amygdala LA/CE-nuclei- and OFC-inspired) + one sigmoid output unit |

The High Road output (4096-d) and Middle Road output (512-d) are concatenated (4608-d) and passed through
the Valence Module's fully connected layers to a single sigmoid unit, which is linearly rescaled from
`[0, 1]` to the `[1, 9]` IAPS valence scale at evaluation time.

### Five checkpoints, one training pipeline

This repository hosts every checkpoint along the training pipeline described in the
[GitHub README](https://github.com/lab-smile/FearConditioningAI#training) — same architecture
(`Visual_Cortex_Amygdala`) throughout, so any of them can be loaded with the same code:

| File | Stage | Description |
|---|---|---|
| `vca_ckvideo_batch128_lr2e-5_epoch20.pth` | 0 | Trained from scratch on the Cowen & Keltner Videoframe dataset |
| `vca_IAPS_batch10_lr2e-4_epoch23.pth` | 1 | Fine-tuned on full-size IAPS images |
| `base_model_vca_IAPS_quadrant.pth` | 2 | Fine-tuned to the quadrant-cropped input layout — **pre-conditioning**: has learned to decode valence from natural scenes (the US) but has never seen the conditioned stimulus (CS, a Gabor patch) |
| `base_model_conditioned_orientation_epoch1.pth` | 3, epoch 1 | First epoch of Pavlovian conditioning (CS+ Gabor patch paired with pleasant/unpleasant IAPS US); early/under-trained, kept for provenance |
| `base_model_conditioned_orientation_epoch100.pth` | 3, epoch 100 | **Post-conditioning (final)** — used throughout the paper's conditioning/generalization/representational-alignment analyses |

Comparing the pre- (Stage 2) and post-conditioning (Stage 3, epoch 100) checkpoints' responses to the CS
alone is what reveals the learned CS→valence association (and, at the representation level, the
increasing CS/US alignment reported in the paper).

---

## Intended use

- Reproducing the paper's Pavlovian-conditioning experiments and figures.
- Extending the model to new conditioning paradigms, stimulus sets, or ablations (e.g. the
  attention-free variant, `Visual_Cortex_Amygdala_wo_Attention`) for **research purposes**.
- Studying how a two-pathway (ventral-stream + shortcut) architecture with attention reproduces
  behavioral/representational signatures of associative emotional learning.
- Feature extraction / representational analysis (see `Channel_Activity_Extraction.py`,
  `Manifold_Visualization.py`, `SVM_Analysis_*.py` in the GitHub repo) for downstream neuroscience analyses.

**Out of scope:** general-purpose sentiment analysis, affect recognition on non-IAPS-like natural images,
clinical/diagnostic use, or any decision-making about real individuals' emotional states.

---

## Limitations

- **Frozen ImageNet backbone.** The High Road (VGG-16) is never fine-tuned, so the model inherits
  ImageNet's visual biases; only the shortcut pathway and valence module are trained on affective data.
- **Narrow, licensed training data.** IAPS is a relatively small, curated stimulus set under a
  data-use/confidentiality agreement (not redistributed with the code or this checkpoint); the model's
  generalization to naturalistic, in-the-wild imagery is untested.
- **Two-alternative conditioning paradigm.** The conditioning stage pairs exactly two Gabor orientations
  (45°, 135°) with unpleasant/pleasant IAPS images; behavior on other CS types has not been evaluated.
- **Not validated against individual human subjects.** Comparisons to human data in the paper are at the
  group/aggregate level; the model is not a predictive model of any specific person's affective response.
- **Single scalar output.** The model predicts only valence (pleasant ↔ unpleasant), not arousal or
  discrete emotion categories.

---

## Evaluation metrics

Model quality is reported using:

- **Pearson correlation (R / R²)** between predicted and ground-truth (SAM-rated) valence, computed by
  `reg_eval_model` / `cond_eval_model` in [`utils.py`](https://github.com/lab-smile/FearConditioningAI/blob/main/utils.py).
- **Mean-squared error (MSE)** between predicted and ground-truth valence (rescaled to the 1–9 scale).
- Post-conditioning, generalization and CS/US **representational alignment** (single-unit tuning and
  population-level RSA/t-SNE, via `Channel_Activity_Extraction.py`, `Manifold_Visualization.py`,
  `SVM_Analysis_Emotion.py`, `SVM_Analysis_Before_After.py`) are used to assess whether conditioning
  reproduces human associative-learning signatures.

The full quantitative results (per-stage R/MSE, generalization curves, and alignment statistics) are
reported in the paper's tables/figures — see https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19327.

---

## Training dataset

Training proceeds in stages, each building on the previous stage's checkpoint (see the GitHub README's
[Training](https://github.com/lab-smile/FearConditioningAI#training) section for exact commands):

| Stage | Dataset | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Cowen & Keltner (2017) Videoframe dataset (2,185 emotion-eliciting video clips, one frame sampled every 10th frame) | Pretrain valence regression from scratch on natural scenes |
| 1 | International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Bradley & Lang, 1994/2007), full-size images, 8:1:1 train/val/test split | Adapt to the US stimuli used in conditioning |
| 2 | IAPS, quadrant-cropped layout | Fine-tune to the spatial layout used during conditioning |
| 3 | IAPS (US, in the 4th quadrant) × Gabor patches (CS, in the 2nd quadrant; 45°/135° orientation, varying spatial frequency/contrast, generated via `Gabor4Seowung.m`) | Pavlovian conditioning: pair CS+ with pleasant/unpleasant US |

Labels are human valence ratings on a 1–9 scale (Self-Assessment Manikin; Bradley & Lang, 1994).
**The IAPS images themselves are not redistributed** with the code or this model repository due to a
data-use/confidentiality agreement — obtain access to IAPS independently to reproduce training from
scratch. The Gabor-patch CS stimuli are procedurally generated and have no such restriction.

Note the input layout differs by stage: Stage 0/1 checkpoints expect a full-frame natural image
(resize + normalize only), while Stage 2/3 checkpoints expect the quadrant-cropped layout (see
[Data preprocessing](https://github.com/lab-smile/FearConditioningAI#data-preprocessing) in the GitHub
README) — feeding a full-frame image to a Stage 2/3 checkpoint (or vice versa) will not reproduce the
reported behavior.

---

## How to use

This is a plain PyTorch checkpoint (not a `transformers` model), so inference requires the model class
definition from the companion GitHub repository. See [`inference_example.py`](inference_example.py) in
this repository for a complete, runnable example. In short:

```bash
git clone https://github.com/lab-smile/FearConditioningAI.git
cd FearConditioningAI
pip install -r requirements.txt   # or: conda env create -f environment-<platform>.yml
```

```python
import torch
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
from models.VGG_Model import Visual_Cortex_Amygdala

repo_id = "smilelab/visual-valence-model"
# swap in any filename from the checkpoint table above, e.g. "vca_ckvideo_batch128_lr2e-5_epoch20.pth"
ckpt_path = hf_hub_download(repo_id=repo_id, filename="base_model_conditioned_orientation_epoch100.pth")

model = Visual_Cortex_Amygdala()
checkpoint = torch.load(ckpt_path, map_location="cpu", weights_only=False)
model.load_state_dict(checkpoint["state_dict"], strict=False)
model.eval()
```

See `inference_example.py` for image preprocessing (resize/normalize + quadrant placement of the CS/US)
and how to rescale the model's sigmoid output back to the 1–9 valence scale.

---

## Citation

If you use this model, please cite the paper:

```bibtex
@article{leem2026associative,
  title   = {Associative Emotional Learning in Convolutional Neural Networks},
  author  = {Leem, Seowung and Keil, Andreas and Ding, Mingzhou and Fang, Ruogu},
  journal = {Neural Computation},
  year    = {2026},
  note    = {in press},
  eprint  = {2607.19327},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url     = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19327}
}
```

Please also cite the datasets and methods this model builds on (IAPS, Cowen & Keltner Videoframe, SAM,
VGG-16, ImageNet, ECA-Net, Rescorla-Wagner) — full references in the
[GitHub README's Citations section](https://github.com/lab-smile/FearConditioningAI#citations).

---

## License

This model is released under the **MIT License**, matching the
[GitHub repository](https://github.com/lab-smile/FearConditioningAI/blob/main/LICENSE).

## Contact

| Name | Email |
|---|---|
| Seowung Leem | leem.s@ufl.edu |
| Dr. Ruogu Fang | ruogu.fang@bme.ufl.edu |