Optimizing Lightweight Convolutional Networks via Topological Attention and Entropy-Constrained Distillation: A Spectral–Topological Approach for Robust Facial Expression Recognition

Deep learning models typically rely on large-scale datasets with accurate annotations, yet real-world applications inevitably suffer from label noise, which severely degrades generalization—particularly for lightweight neural networks with limited capacity. Existing learning with noisy labels methods are mainly designed for over-parameterized models and are often unsuitable for resource-constrained deployment. To address this challenge, we propose a robust framework that integrates a Micro Hybrid Attention Module (MHAM) with knowledge distillation (KD) for lightweight architectures such as MobileNetV3. MHAM employs a decoupled channel–spatial attention design to enhance discriminative feature extraction while suppressing noise-sensitive background responses. From a graph–signal perspective, MHAM can be interpreted as a spectral smoothing operator that improves optimization stability. In addition, knowledge distillation with soft teacher supervision mitigates overfitting to corrupted hard labels and reduces prediction uncertainty. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. On FER2013, a real-world noisy facial expression recognition benchmark, our approach achieves 68.5% accuracy with only 0.52M parameters, while reducing optimization variance by 24%. On CIFAR-10 with 40% symmetric label noise, it improves accuracy from 54.85% to 60.10%. On CIFAR-10N with multiple types of real-world human annotation noise, the proposed method consistently achieves 63.9–71.9% accuracy under different noise protocols. These results show that the proposed framework provides an efficient and robust solution for noisy label learning in lightweight facial expression and object classification on edge devices.