Qiang Wan

Qiang Wan, Zilong Huang, Jiachen Lu et al. · tencent-ai

Since the introduction of Vision Transformers, the landscape of many computer vision tasks (e.g., semantic segmentation), which has been overwhelmingly dominated by CNNs, recently has significantly revolutionized. However, the computational cost and memory requirement renders these methods unsuitable on the mobile device. In this paper, we introduce a new method squeeze-enhanced Axial Transformer (SeaFormer) for mobile visual recognition. Specifically, we design a generic attention block characterized by the formulation of squeeze Axial and detail enhancement. It can be further used to create a family of backbone architectures with superior cost-effectiveness. Coupled with a light segmentation head, we achieve the best trade-off between segmentation accuracy and latency on the ARM-based mobile devices on the ADE20K, Cityscapes, Pascal Context and COCO-Stuff datasets. Critically, we beat both the mobilefriendly rivals and Transformer-based counterparts with better performance and lower latency without bells and whistles. Furthermore, we incorporate a feature upsampling-based multi-resolution distillation technique, further reducing the inference latency of the proposed framework. Beyond semantic segmentation, we further apply the proposed SeaFormer architecture to image classification and object detection problems, demonstrating the potential of serving as a versatile mobile-friendly backbone. Our code and models are made publicly available at https://github.com/fudan-zvg/SeaFormer.

Qiang Wan, Ze Yang, Dawei Yang et al.

Generative Recommendation (GR) has gained traction for its merits of superior performance and cold-start capability. As the vital role in GR, Semantic Identifiers (SIDs) represent item semantics through discrete tokens. However, current techniques for SID generation based on vector quantization face two main challenges: (i) training instability, stemming from insufficient gradient propagation through the straight-through estimator and sensitivity to initialization; and (ii) inefficient SID quality assessment, where industrial practice still depends on costly GR training and A/B testing. To address these challenges, we propose Reference Vector-Guided Rating Residual Quantization VAE (R3-VAE). This framework incorporates three key innovations: (i) a reference vector that functions as a semantic anchor for the initial features, thereby mitigating sensitivity to initialization; (ii) a dot product-based rating mechanism designed to stabilize the training process and prevent codebook collapse; and (iii) two SID evaluation metrics, Semantic Cohesion and Preference Discrimination, serving as regularization terms during training. Empirical results on six benchmarks demonstrate that R3-VAE outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average improvement of 14.2% in Recall@10 and 15.5% in NDCG@10 across three Amazon datasets. Furthermore, we perform GR training and online A/B tests on Toutiao. Our method achieves a 1.62% improvement in MRR and a 0.83% gain in StayTime/U versus baselines. Additionally, we employ R3-VAE to replace the item ID of CTR model, resulting in significant improvements in content cold start by 15.36%, corroborating the strong applicability and business value in industry-scale recommendation scenarios.

Huang Huang, Qiang Wan, Jari Korhonen

With technology for digital photography and high resolution displays rapidly evolving and gaining popularity, there is a growing demand for blind image quality assessment (BIQA) models for high resolution images. Unfortunately, the publicly available large scale image quality databases used for training BIQA models contain mostly low or general resolution images. Since image resizing affects image quality, we assume that the accuracy of BIQA models trained on low resolution images would not be optimal for high resolution images. Therefore, we created a new high resolution image quality database (HRIQ), consisting of 1120 images with resolution of 2880x2160 pixels. We conducted a subjective study to collect the subjective quality ratings for HRIQ in a controlled laboratory setting, resulting in accurate MOS at high resolution. To demonstrate the importance of a high resolution image quality database for training BIQA models to predict mean opinion scores (MOS) of high resolution images accurately, we trained and tested several traditional and deep learning based BIQA methods on different resolution versions of our database. The database is publicly available in https://github.com/jarikorhonen/hriq.

Tianyang Wu, Lipeng Wan, Yuhang Wang et al.

Significant progress has been made in AI for games, including board games, MOBA, and RTS games. However, complex agents are typically developed in an embedded manner, directly accessing game state information, unlike human players who rely on noisy visual data, leading to unfair competition. Developing complex non-embedded agents remains challenging, especially in card-based RTS games with complex features and large state spaces. We propose a non-embedded offline reinforcement learning training strategy using visual inputs to achieve real-time autonomous gameplay in the RTS game Clash Royale. Due to the lack of a object detection dataset for this game, we designed an efficient generative object detection dataset for training. We extract features using state-of-the-art object detection and optical character recognition models. Our method enables real-time image acquisition, perception feature fusion, decision-making, and control on mobile devices, successfully defeating built-in AI opponents. All code is open-sourced at https://github.com/wty-yy/katacr.

Qiang Wan, Zilong Huang, Bingyi Kang et al.

The issue of generative pretraining for vision models has persisted as a long-standing conundrum. At present, the text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model demonstrates remarkable proficiency in generating high-definition images matching textual inputs, a feat made possible through its pre-training on large-scale image-text pairs. This leads to a natural inquiry: can diffusion models be utilized to tackle visual perception tasks? In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective scheme to harness a diffusion model for visual perception tasks. Our key insight is to introduce learnable embeddings (meta prompts) to the pre-trained diffusion models to extract proper features for perception. The effect of meta prompts are two-fold. First, as a direct replacement of the text embeddings in the T2I models, it can activate task-relevant features during feature extraction. Second, it will be used to re-arrange the extracted features to ensures that the model focuses on the most pertinent features for the task on hand. Additionally, we design a recurrent refinement training strategy that fully leverages the property of diffusion models, thereby yielding stronger visual features. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach. Our approach achieves new performance records in depth estimation tasks on NYU depth V2 and KITTI, and in semantic segmentation task on CityScapes. Concurrently, the proposed method attains results comparable to the current state-of-the-art in semantic segmentation on ADE20K and pose estimation on COCO datasets, further exemplifying its robustness and versatility.