Zhongwei Cheng

Yuhang Yao, Mohammad Mahdi Kamani, Zhongwei Cheng et al.

Much of the value that IoT (Internet-of-Things) devices bring to ``smart'' homes lies in their ability to automatically trigger other devices' actions: for example, a smart camera triggering a smart lock to unlock a door. Manually setting up these rules for smart devices or applications, however, is time-consuming and inefficient. Rule recommendation systems can automatically suggest rules for users by learning which rules are popular based on those previously deployed (e.g., in others' smart homes). Conventional recommendation formulations require a central server to record the rules used in many users' homes, which compromises their privacy and leaves them vulnerable to attacks on the central server's database of rules. Moreover, these solutions typically leverage generic user-item matrix methods that do not fully exploit the structure of the rule recommendation problem. In this paper, we propose a new rule recommendation system, dubbed as FedRule, to address these challenges. One graph is constructed per user upon the rules s/he is using, and the rule recommendation is formulated as a link prediction task in these graphs. This formulation enables us to design a federated training algorithm that is able to keep users' data private. Extensive experiments corroborate our claims by demonstrating that FedRule has comparable performance as the centralized setting and outperforms conventional solutions.

Junyao Hu, Zhongwei Cheng, Waikeung Wong et al.

Virtual try-on (VTON) has advanced single-garment visualization, yet real-world fashion centers on full outfits with multiple garments, accessories, fine-grained categories, layering, and diverse styling, remaining beyond current VTON systems. Existing datasets are category-limited and lack outfit diversity. We introduce Garments2Look, the first large-scale multimodal dataset for outfit-level VTON, comprising 80K many-garments-to-one-look pairs across 40 major categories and 300+ fine-grained subcategories. Each pair includes an outfit with 3-12 reference garment images (Average 4.48), a model image wearing the outfit, and detailed item and try-on textual annotations. To balance authenticity and diversity, we propose a synthesis pipeline. It involves heuristically constructing outfit lists before generating try-on results, with the entire process subjected to strict automated filtering and human validation to ensure data quality. To probe task difficulty, we adapt SOTA VTON methods and general-purpose image editing models to establish baselines. Results show current methods struggle to try on complete outfits seamlessly and to infer correct layering and styling, leading to misalignment and artifacts.

Zhongjie Yu, Shuyang Wang, Lin Chen et al.

Few-shot audio classification is an emerging topic that attracts more and more attention from the research community. Most existing work ignores the specificity of the form of the audio spectrogram and focuses largely on the embedding space borrowed from image tasks, while in this work, we aim to take advantage of this special audio format and propose a new method by hallucinating high-frequency and low-frequency parts as structured concepts. Extensive experiments on ESC-50 and our curated balanced Kaggle18 dataset show the proposed method outperforms the baseline by a notable margin. The way that our method hallucinates high-frequency and low-frequency parts also enables its interpretability and opens up new potentials for the few-shot audio classification.

Hung-Min Hsu, Xinyu Yuan, Baohua Zhu et al.

Package theft detection has been a challenging task mainly due to lack of training data and a wide variety of package theft cases in reality. In this paper, we propose a new Global and Local Fusion Package Theft Detection Embedding (GLF-PTDE) framework to generate package theft scores for each segment within a video to fulfill the real-world requirements on package theft detection. Moreover, we construct a novel Package Theft Detection dataset to facilitate the research on this task. Our method achieves 80% AUC performance on the newly proposed dataset, showing the effectiveness of the proposed GLF-PTDE framework and its robustness in different real scenes for package theft detection.

Mohammad Mahdi Kamani, Zhongwei Cheng, Lin Chen

The massive growth in the utilization of edge AI has made the applications of machine learning models ubiquitous in different domains. Despite the computation and communication efficiency of these systems, due to limited computation resources on edge devices, relying on more computationally rich systems on the cloud side is inevitable in most cases. Cloud inference systems can achieve the best performance while the computation and communication cost is dramatically increasing by the expansion of a number of edge devices relying on these systems. Hence, there is a trade-off between the computation, communication, and performance of these systems. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, dubbed as Eccentric that learns models with different levels of trade-offs between these conflicting objectives. This framework, based on an adaptation of knowledge from the edge model to the cloud one, reduces the computation and communication costs of the system during inference while achieving the best performance possible. The Eccentric framework can be considered as a new form of compression method suited for edge-cloud inference systems to reduce both computation and communication costs. Empirical studies on classification and object detection tasks corroborate the efficacy of this framework.

Xin Shen, Praful Agrawal, Zhongwei Cheng

Multi-label classification models have a wide range of applications in E-commerce, including visual-based label predictions and language-based sentiment classifications. A major challenge in achieving satisfactory performance for these tasks in the real world is the notable imbalance in data distribution. For instance, in fashion attribute detection, there may be only six 'puff sleeve' clothes among 1000 products in most E-commerce fashion catalogs. To address this issue, we explore more data-efficient model training techniques rather than acquiring a huge amount of annotations to collect sufficient samples, which is neither economic nor scalable. In this paper, we propose a state-of-the-art weighted objective function to boost the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) for multi-label classification with long-tailed data distribution. Our experiments involve image-based attribute classification of fashion apparels, and the results demonstrate favorable performance for the new weighting method compared to non-weighted and inverse-frequency-based weighting mechanisms. We further evaluate the robustness of the new weighting mechanism using two popular fashion attribute types in today's fashion industry: sleevetype and archetype.