TRUST-SER: On The Trustworthiness Of Fine-Tuning Pre-Trained Speech Embeddings For Speech Emotion Recognition

Recent studies have explored using pre-trained embeddings for speech emotion recognition, achieving comparable performance to conventional methods that rely on low-level knowledge-inspired acoustic features. These embeddings are often generated from models trained on large-scale speech datasets using self-supervised or weakly-supervised learning objectives. Despite the significant advancements made in SER through pre-trained embeddings, there is a limited understanding of the trustworthiness of these methods, including privacy breaches, unfair performance, vulnerability to adversarial attacks, and computational cost, all of which may hinder the real-world deployment of these systems. In response, we introduce TrustSER, a general framework designed to evaluate the trustworthiness of SER systems using deep learning methods, focusing on privacy, safety, fairness, and sustainability, offering unique insights into future research in the field of SER. Our code is publicly available under: https://github.com/usc-sail/trust-ser.