Jun Tang

Humen Zhong, Jun Tang, Wenhai Wang et al.

Recent approaches for end-to-end text spotting have achieved promising results. However, most of the current spotters were plagued by the inconsistency problem between text detection and recognition. In this work, we introduce and prove the existence of the inconsistency problem and analyze it from two aspects: (1) inconsistency of text recognition features between training and testing, and (2) inconsistency of optimization targets between text detection and recognition. To solve the aforementioned issues, we propose a differentiable Auto-Rectification Module (ARM) together with a new training strategy to enable propagating recognition loss back into detection branch, so that our detection branch can be jointly optimized by detection and recognition targets, which largely alleviates the inconsistency problem between text detection and recognition. Based on these designs, we present a simple yet robust end-to-end text spotting framework, termed Auto-Rectification Text Spotter (ARTS), to detect and recognize arbitrarily-shaped text in natural scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method. In particular, our ARTS-S achieves 77.1% end-to-end text spotting F-measure on Total-Text at a competitive speed of 10.5 FPS, which significantly outperforms previous methods in both accuracy and inference speed.

Minghang He, Minghui Liao, Zhibo Yang et al.

Over the past few years, the field of scene text detection has progressed rapidly that modern text detectors are able to hunt text in various challenging scenarios. However, they might still fall short when handling text instances of extreme aspect ratios and varying scales. To tackle such difficulties, we propose in this paper a new algorithm for scene text detection, which puts forward a set of strategies to significantly improve the quality of text localization. Specifically, a Text Feature Alignment Module (TFAM) is proposed to dynamically adjust the receptive fields of features based on initial raw detections; a Position-Aware Non-Maximum Suppression (PA-NMS) module is devised to selectively concentrate on reliable raw detections and exclude unreliable ones; besides, we propose an Instance-wise IoU loss for balanced training to deal with text instances of different scales. An extensive ablation study demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed strategies. The resulting text detection system, which integrates the proposed strategies with a leading scene text detector EAST, achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on various standard benchmarks for text detection while keeping a fast running speed.

Shu-Ting Shi, Wenhao Zheng, Jun Tang et al.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is an essential task in industrial applications such as video recommendation. Recently, deep learning models have been proposed to learn the representation of users' overall interests, while ignoring the fact that interests may dynamically change over time. We argue that it is necessary to consider the continuous-time information in CTR models to track user interest trend from rich historical behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Time-Stream framework (DTS) which introduces the time information by an ordinary differential equations (ODE). DTS continuously models the evolution of interests using a neural network, and thus is able to tackle the challenge of dynamically representing users' interests based on their historical behaviors. In addition, our framework can be seamlessly applied to any existing deep CTR models by leveraging the additional Time-Stream Module, while no changes are made to the original CTR models. Experiments on public dataset as well as real industry dataset with billions of samples demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approaches, which achieve superior performance compared with existing methods.

Michael Ying Yang, Matthias Reso, Jun Tang et al.

In this paper, we propose an unsupervised video object co-segmentation framework based on the primary object proposals to extract the common foreground object(s) from a given video set. In addition to the objectness attributes and motion coherence our framework exploits the temporal consistency of the object-like regions between adjacent frames to enrich the set of original object proposals. We call the enriched proposal sets temporal proposal streams, as they are composed of the most similar proposals from each frame augmented with predicted proposals using temporally consistent superpixel information. The temporal proposal streams represent all the possible region tubes of the objects. Therefore, we formulate a graphical model to select a proposal stream for each object in which the pairwise potentials consist of the appearance dissimilarity between different streams in the same video and also the similarity between the streams in different videos. This model is suitable for single (multiple) foreground objects in two (more) videos, which can be solved by any existing energy minimization method. We evaluate our proposed framework by comparing it to other video co-segmentation algorithms. Our method achieves improved performance on state-of-the-art benchmark datasets.