Miao Fan

Miao Fan, Yeqi Bai, Mingming Sun et al.

Relation classification (RC) plays a pivotal role in both natural language understanding and knowledge graph completion. It is generally formulated as a task to recognize the relationship between two entities of interest appearing in a free-text sentence. Conventional approaches on RC, regardless of feature engineering or deep learning based, can obtain promising performance on categorizing common types of relation leaving a large proportion of unrecognizable long-tail relations due to insufficient labeled instances for training. In this paper, we consider few-shot learning is of great practical significance to RC and thus improve a modern framework of metric learning for few-shot RC. Specifically, we adopt the large-margin ProtoNet with fine-grained features, expecting they can generalize well on long-tail relations. Extensive experiments were conducted by FewRel, a large-scale supervised few-shot RC dataset, to evaluate our framework: LM-ProtoNet (FGF). The results demonstrate that it can achieve substantial improvements over many baseline approaches.

Miao Fan, Mingrui Chen, Chen Hu et al.

Image matching is a fundamental and critical task in various visual applications, such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and image retrieval, which require accurate pose estimation. However, most existing methods ignore the occlusion relations between objects caused by camera motion and scene structure. In this paper, we propose Occ$^2$Net, a novel image matching method that models occlusion relations using 3D occupancy and infers matching points in occluded regions. Thanks to the inductive bias encoded in the Occupancy Estimation (OE) module, it greatly simplifies bootstrapping of a multi-view consistent 3D representation that can then integrate information from multiple views. Together with an Occlusion-Aware (OA) module, it incorporates attention layers and rotation alignment to enable matching between occluded and visible points. We evaluate our method on both real-world and simulated datasets and demonstrate its superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on several metrics, especially in occlusion scenarios.

Miao Fan, Jizhou Huang, Haifeng Wang · baidu

With the increased popularity of mobile devices, Web mapping services have become an indispensable tool in our daily lives. To provide user-satisfied services, such as location searches, the point of interest (POI) database is the fundamental infrastructure, as it archives multimodal information on billions of geographic locations closely related to people's lives, such as a shop or a bank. Therefore, verifying the correctness of a large-scale POI database is vital. To achieve this goal, many industrial companies adopt volunteered geographic information (VGI) platforms that enable thousands of crowdworkers and expert mappers to verify POIs seamlessly; but to do so, they have to spend millions of dollars every year. To save the tremendous labor costs, we devised DuMapper, an automatic system for large-scale POI verification with the multimodal street-view data at Baidu Maps. DuMapper takes the signboard image and the coordinates of a real-world place as input to generate a low-dimensional vector, which can be leveraged by ANN algorithms to conduct a more accurate search through billions of archived POIs in the database for verification within milliseconds. It can significantly increase the throughput of POI verification by $50$ times. DuMapper has already been deployed in production since \DuMPOnline, which dramatically improves the productivity and efficiency of POI verification at Baidu Maps. As of December 31, 2021, it has enacted over $405$ million iterations of POI verification within a 3.5-year period, representing an approximate workload of $800$ high-performance expert mappers.

Miao Fan, Jizhou Huang, An Zhuo et al. · baidu

The value assessment of private properties is an attractive but challenging task which is widely concerned by a majority of people around the world. A prolonged topic among us is ``\textit{how much is my house worth?}''. To answer this question, most experienced agencies would like to price a property given the factors of its attributes as well as the demographics and the public facilities around it. However, no one knows the exact prices of these factors, especially the values of public facilities which may help assess private properties. In this paper, we introduce our newly launched project ``Monopoly'' (named after a classic board game) in which we propose a distributed approach for revaluing private properties by learning to price public facilities (such as hospitals etc.) with the large-scale urban data we have accumulated via Baidu Maps. To be specific, our method organizes many points of interest (POIs) into an undirected weighted graph and formulates multiple factors including the virtual prices of surrounding public facilities as adaptive variables to parallelly estimate the housing prices we know. Then the prices of both public facilities and private properties can be iteratively updated according to the loss of prediction until convergence. We have conducted extensive experiments with the large-scale urban data of several metropolises in China. Results show that our approach outperforms several mainstream methods with significant margins. Further insights from more in-depth discussions demonstrate that the ``Monopoly'' is an innovative application in the interdisciplinary field of business intelligence and urban computing, and it will be beneficial to tens of millions of our users for investments and to the governments for urban planning as well as taxation.

Xiangzeng Liu, Chi Wang, Guanglu Shi et al.

Local feature matching remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Recent Area to Point Matching (A2PM) methods have improved matching accuracy. However, existing research based on this framework relies on inefficient pixel-level comparisons and complex graph matching that limit scalability. In this work, we introduce the Semantic and Geometric-aware Descriptor Network (SGAD), which fundamentally rethinks area-based matching by generating highly discriminative area descriptors that enable direct matching without complex graph optimization. This approach significantly improves both accuracy and efficiency of area matching. We further improve the performance of area matching through a novel supervision strategy that decomposes the area matching task into classification and ranking subtasks. Finally, we introduce the Hierarchical Containment Redundancy Filter (HCRF) to eliminate overlapping areas by analyzing containment graphs. SGAD demonstrates remarkable performance gains, reducing runtime by 60x (0.82s vs. 60.23s) compared to MESA. Extensive evaluations show consistent improvements across multiple point matchers: SGAD+LoFTR reduces runtime compared to DKM, while achieving higher accuracy (0.82s vs. 1.51s, 65.98 vs. 61.11) in outdoor pose estimation, and SGAD+ROMA delivers +7.39% AUC@5° in indoor pose estimation, establishing a new state-of-the-art.

Zhongzhang Chen, Miao Fan, Shengtong Xu et al.

High-definition (HD) semantic mapping of complex intersections poses significant challenges for traditional vehicle-based approaches due to occlusions and limited perspectives. This paper introduces a novel camera-LiDAR fusion framework that leverages elevated intelligent roadside units (IRUs). Additionally, we present RS-seq, a comprehensive dataset developed through the systematic enhancement and annotation of the V2X-Seq dataset. RS-seq includes precisely labelled camera imagery and LiDAR point clouds collected from roadside installations, along with vectorized maps for seven intersections annotated with detailed features such as lane dividers, pedestrian crossings, and stop lines. This dataset facilitates the systematic investigation of cross-modal complementarity for HD map generation using IRU data. The proposed fusion framework employs a two-stage process that integrates modality-specific feature extraction and cross-modal semantic integration, capitalizing on camera high-resolution texture and precise geometric data from LiDAR. Quantitative evaluations using the RS-seq dataset demonstrate that our multimodal approach consistently surpasses unimodal methods. Specifically, compared to unimodal baselines evaluated on the RS-seq dataset, the multimodal approach improves the mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) for semantic segmentation by 4\% over the image-only results and 18\% over the point cloud-only results. This study establishes a baseline methodology for IRU-based HD semantic mapping and provides a valuable dataset for future research in infrastructure-assisted autonomous driving systems.

Quanxin Zheng, Miao Fan, Shengtong Xu et al.

Vectorized maps are indispensable for precise navigation and the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. Traditional methods for constructing these maps fall into two categories: offline techniques, which rely on expensive, labor-intensive LiDAR data collection and manual annotation, and online approaches that use onboard cameras to reduce costs but suffer from limited performance, especially at complex intersections. To bridge this gap, we introduce MRC-VMap, a cost-effective, vision-centric, end-to-end neural network designed to generate high-definition vectorized maps directly at intersections. Leveraging existing roadside surveillance cameras, MRC-VMap directly converts time-aligned, multi-directional images into vectorized map representations. This integrated solution lowers the need for additional intermediate modules--such as separate feature extraction and Bird's-Eye View (BEV) conversion steps--thus reducing both computational overhead and error propagation. Moreover, the use of multiple camera views enhances mapping completeness, mitigates occlusions, and provides robust performance under practical deployment constraints. Extensive experiments conducted on 4,000 intersections across 4 major metropolitan areas in China demonstrate that MRC-VMap not only outperforms state-of-the-art online methods but also achieves accuracy comparable to high-cost LiDAR-based approaches, thereby offering a scalable and efficient solution for modern autonomous navigation systems.

Yibo Sun, Jizhou Huang, Chunyuan Yuan et al.

Providing timely accessibility reminders of a point-of-interest (POI) plays a vital role in improving user satisfaction of finding places and making visiting decisions. However, it is difficult to keep the POI database in sync with the real-world counterparts due to the dynamic nature of business changes. To alleviate this problem, we formulate and present a practical solution that jointly extracts POI mentions and identifies their coupled accessibility labels from unstructured text. We approach this task as a sequence tagging problem, where the goal is to produce <POI name, accessibility label> pairs from unstructured text. This task is challenging because of two main issues: (1) POI names are often newly-coined words so as to successfully register new entities or brands and (2) there may exist multiple pairs in the text, which necessitates dealing with one-to-many or many-to-one mapping to make each POI coupled with its accessibility label. To this end, we propose a Geographic-Enhanced and Dependency-guIded sequence Tagging (GEDIT) model to concurrently address the two challenges. First, to alleviate challenge #1, we develop a geographic-enhanced pre-trained model to learn the text representations. Second, to mitigate challenge #2, we apply a relational graph convolutional network to learn the tree node representations from the parsed dependency tree. Finally, we construct a neural sequence tagging model by integrating and feeding the previously pre-learned representations into a CRF layer. Extensive experiments conducted on a real-world dataset demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of GEDIT. In addition, it has already been deployed in production at Baidu Maps. Statistics show that the proposed solution can save significant human effort and labor costs to deal with the same amount of documents, which confirms that it is a practical way for POI accessibility maintenance.

Min Yang, Dongliang He, Miao Fan et al.

Image Retrieval is a fundamental task of obtaining images similar to the query one from a database. A common image retrieval practice is to firstly retrieve candidate images via similarity search using global image features and then re-rank the candidates by leveraging their local features. Previous learning-based studies mainly focus on either global or local image representation learning to tackle the retrieval task. In this paper, we abandon the two-stage paradigm and seek to design an effective single-stage solution by integrating local and global information inside images into compact image representations. Specifically, we propose a Deep Orthogonal Local and Global (DOLG) information fusion framework for end-to-end image retrieval. It attentively extracts representative local information with multi-atrous convolutions and self-attention at first. Components orthogonal to the global image representation are then extracted from the local information. At last, the orthogonal components are concatenated with the global representation as a complementary, and then aggregation is performed to generate the final representation. The whole framework is end-to-end differentiable and can be trained with image-level labels. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our solution and show that our model achieves state-of-the-art image retrieval performances on Revisited Oxford and Paris datasets.

Dongdong Li, Zhaochun Ren, Pengjie Ren et al.

Medical dialogue generation aims to provide automatic and accurate responses to assist physicians to obtain diagnosis and treatment suggestions in an efficient manner. In medical dialogues two key characteristics are relevant for response generation: patient states (such as symptoms, medication) and physician actions (such as diagnosis, treatments). In medical scenarios large-scale human annotations are usually not available, due to the high costs and privacy requirements. Hence, current approaches to medical dialogue generation typically do not explicitly account for patient states and physician actions, and focus on implicit representation instead. We propose an end-to-end variational reasoning approach to medical dialogue generation. To be able to deal with a limited amount of labeled data, we introduce both patient state and physician action as latent variables with categorical priors for explicit patient state tracking and physician policy learning, respectively. We propose a variational Bayesian generative approach to approximate posterior distributions over patient states and physician actions. We use an efficient stochastic gradient variational Bayes estimator to optimize the derived evidence lower bound, where a 2-stage collapsed inference method is proposed to reduce the bias during model training. A physician policy network composed of an action-classifier and two reasoning detectors is proposed for augmented reasoning ability. We conduct experiments on three datasets collected from medical platforms. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of objective and subjective evaluation metrics. Our experiments also indicate that our proposed semi-supervised reasoning method achieves a comparable performance as state-of-the-art fully supervised learning baselines for physician policy learning.

Mingming Sun, Xu Li, Xin Wang et al.

In this paper, we consider the problem of open information extraction (OIE) for extracting entity and relation level intermediate structures from sentences in open-domain. We focus on four types of valuable intermediate structures (Relation, Attribute, Description, and Concept), and propose a unified knowledge expression form, SAOKE, to express them. We publicly release a data set which contains more than forty thousand sentences and the corresponding facts in the SAOKE format labeled by crowd-sourcing. To our knowledge, this is the largest publicly available human labeled data set for open information extraction tasks. Using this labeled SAOKE data set, we train an end-to-end neural model using the sequenceto-sequence paradigm, called Logician, to transform sentences into facts. For each sentence, different to existing algorithms which generally focus on extracting each single fact without concerning other possible facts, Logician performs a global optimization over all possible involved facts, in which facts not only compete with each other to attract the attention of words, but also cooperate to share words. An experimental study on various types of open domain relation extraction tasks reveals the consistent superiority of Logician to other states-of-the-art algorithms. The experiments verify the reasonableness of SAOKE format, the valuableness of SAOKE data set, the effectiveness of the proposed Logician model, and the feasibility of the methodology to apply end-to-end learning paradigm on supervised data sets for the challenging tasks of open information extraction.

Miao Fan, Doo Soon Kim

Superior to state-of-the-art approaches which compete in table recognition with 67 annotated government reports in PDF format released by {\it ICDAR 2013 Table Competition}, this paper contributes a novel paradigm leveraging large-scale unlabeled PDF documents to open-domain table detection. We integrate the paradigm into our latest developed system ({\it PdfExtra}) to detect the region of tables by means of 9,466 academic articles from the entire repository of {\it ACL Anthology}, where almost all papers are archived by PDF format without annotation for tables. The paradigm first designs heuristics to automatically construct weakly labeled data. It then feeds diverse evidences, such as layouts of documents and linguistic features, which are extracted by {\it Apache PDFBox} and processed by {\it Stanford NLP} toolkit, into different canonical classifiers. We finally use these classifiers, i.e. {\it Naive Bayes}, {\it Logistic Regression} and {\it Support Vector Machine}, to collaboratively vote on the region of tables. Experimental results show that {\it PdfExtra} achieves a great leap forward, compared with the state-of-the-art approach. Moreover, we discuss the factors of different features, learning models and even domains of documents that may impact the performance. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our paradigm is compatible enough to leverage various features and learning models for open-domain table region detection within PDF files.

Miao Fan, Qiang Zhou, Thomas Fang Zheng

Entity linking is an indispensable operation of populating knowledge repositories for information extraction. It studies on aligning a textual entity mention to its corresponding disambiguated entry in a knowledge repository. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm named distantly supervised entity linking (DSEL), in the sense that the disambiguated entities that belong to a huge knowledge repository (Freebase) are automatically aligned to the corresponding descriptive webpages (Wiki pages). In this way, a large scale of weakly labeled data can be generated without manual annotation and fed to a classifier for linking more newly discovered entities. Compared with traditional paradigms based on solo knowledge base, DSEL benefits more via jointly leveraging the respective advantages of Freebase and Wikipedia. Specifically, the proposed paradigm facilitates bridging the disambiguated labels (Freebase) of entities and their textual descriptions (Wikipedia) for Web-scale entities. Experiments conducted on a dataset of 140,000 items and 60,000 features achieve a baseline F1-measure of 0.517. Furthermore, we analyze the feature performance and improve the F1-measure to 0.545.

Miao Fan, Qiang Zhou, Andrew Abel et al.

This paper contributes a novel embedding model which measures the probability of each belief $\langle h,r,t,m\rangle$ in a large-scale knowledge repository via simultaneously learning distributed representations for entities ($h$ and $t$), relations ($r$), and the words in relation mentions ($m$). It facilitates knowledge completion by means of simple vector operations to discover new beliefs. Given an imperfect belief, we can not only infer the missing entities, predict the unknown relations, but also tell the plausibility of the belief, just leveraging the learnt embeddings of remaining evidences. To demonstrate the scalability and the effectiveness of our model, we conduct experiments on several large-scale repositories which contain millions of beliefs from WordNet, Freebase and NELL, and compare it with other cutting-edge approaches via competing the performances assessed by the tasks of entity inference, relation prediction and triplet classification with respective metrics. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-arts with significant improvements.

Miao Fan, Qiang Zhou, Thomas Fang Zheng et al.

Traditional way of storing facts in triplets ({\it head\_entity, relation, tail\_entity}), abbreviated as ({\it h, r, t}), makes the knowledge intuitively displayed and easily acquired by mankind, but hardly computed or even reasoned by AI machines. Inspired by the success in applying {\it Distributed Representations} to AI-related fields, recent studies expect to represent each entity and relation with a unique low-dimensional embedding, which is different from the symbolic and atomic framework of displaying knowledge in triplets. In this way, the knowledge computing and reasoning can be essentially facilitated by means of a simple {\it vector calculation}, i.e. ${\bf h} + {\bf r} \approx {\bf t}$. We thus contribute an effective model to learn better embeddings satisfying the formula by pulling the positive tail entities ${\bf t^{+}}$ to get together and close to {\bf h} + {\bf r} ({\it Nearest Neighbor}), and simultaneously pushing the negatives ${\bf t^{-}}$ away from the positives ${\bf t^{+}}$ via keeping a {\it Large Margin}. We also design a corresponding learning algorithm to efficiently find the optimal solution based on {\it Stochastic Gradient Descent} in iterative fashion. Quantitative experiments illustrate that our approach can achieve the state-of-the-art performance, compared with several latest methods on some benchmark datasets for two classical applications, i.e. {\it Link prediction} and {\it Triplet classification}. Moreover, we analyze the parameter complexities among all the evaluated models, and analytical results indicate that our model needs fewer computational resources on outperforming the other methods.

Miao Fan, Kai Cao, Yifan He et al.

This paper contributes a joint embedding model for predicting relations between a pair of entities in the scenario of relation inference. It differs from most stand-alone approaches which separately operate on either knowledge bases or free texts. The proposed model simultaneously learns low-dimensional vector representations for both triplets in knowledge repositories and the mentions of relations in free texts, so that we can leverage the evidence both resources to make more accurate predictions. We use NELL to evaluate the performance of our approach, compared with cutting-edge methods. Results of extensive experiments show that our model achieves significant improvement on relation extraction.

Miao Fan, Qiang Zhou, Thomas Fang Zheng

This paper considers the problem of knowledge inference on large-scale imperfect repositories with incomplete coverage by means of embedding entities and relations at the first attempt. We propose IIKE (Imperfect and Incomplete Knowledge Embedding), a probabilistic model which measures the probability of each belief, i.e. $\langle h,r,t\rangle$, in large-scale knowledge bases such as NELL and Freebase, and our objective is to learn a better low-dimensional vector representation for each entity ($h$ and $t$) and relation ($r$) in the process of minimizing the loss of fitting the corresponding confidence given by machine learning (NELL) or crowdsouring (Freebase), so that we can use $||{\bf h} + {\bf r} - {\bf t}||$ to assess the plausibility of a belief when conducting inference. We use subsets of those inexact knowledge bases to train our model and test the performances of link prediction and triplet classification on ground truth beliefs, respectively. The results of extensive experiments show that IIKE achieves significant improvement compared with the baseline and state-of-the-art approaches.

Miao Fan, Deli Zhao, Qiang Zhou et al.

The essence of distantly supervised relation extraction is that it is an incomplete multi-label classification problem with sparse and noisy features. To tackle the sparsity and noise challenges, we propose solving the classification problem using matrix completion on factorized matrix of minimized rank. We formulate relation classification as completing the unknown labels of testing items (entity pairs) in a sparse matrix that concatenates training and testing textual features with training labels. Our algorithmic framework is based on the assumption that the rank of item-by-feature and item-by-label joint matrix is low. We apply two optimization models to recover the underlying low-rank matrix leveraging the sparsity of feature-label matrix. The matrix completion problem is then solved by the fixed point continuation (FPC) algorithm, which can find the global optimum. Experiments on two widely used datasets with different dimensions of textual features demonstrate that our low-rank matrix completion approach significantly outperforms the baseline and the state-of-the-art methods.