Kun Zhang

Wenhui Li, Xinqi Su, Dan Song et al.

Prior image-text matching methods have shown remarkable performance on many benchmark datasets, but most of them overlook the bias in the dataset, which exists in intra-modal and inter-modal, and tend to learn the spurious correlations that extremely degrade the generalization ability of the model. Furthermore, these methods often incorporate biased external knowledge from large-scale datasets as prior knowledge into image-text matching model, which is inevitable to force model further learn biased associations. To address above limitations, this paper firstly utilizes Structural Causal Models (SCMs) to illustrate how intra- and inter-modal confounders damage the image-text matching. Then, we employ backdoor adjustment to propose an innovative Deconfounded Causal Inference Network (DCIN) for image-text matching task. DCIN (1) decomposes the intra- and inter-modal confounders and incorporates them into the encoding stage of visual and textual features, effectively eliminating the spurious correlations during image-text matching, and (2) uses causal inference to mitigate biases of external knowledge. Consequently, the model can learn causality instead of spurious correlations caused by dataset bias. Extensive experiments on two well-known benchmark datasets, i.e., Flickr30K and MSCOCO, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.

Wenhao Li, Jie Zhou, Chuan Luo et al.

In the realm of modern mobile E-commerce, providing users with nearby commercial service recommendations through location-based online services has become increasingly vital. While machine learning approaches have shown promise in multi-scene recommendation, existing methodologies often struggle to address cold-start problems in unprecedented scenes: the increasing diversity of commercial choices, along with the short online lifespan of scenes, give rise to the complexity of effective recommendations in online and dynamic scenes. In this work, we propose Scene-wise Adaptive Network (SwAN), a novel approach that emphasizes high-performance cold-start online recommendations for new scenes. Our approach introduces several crucial capabilities, including scene similarity learning, user-specific scene transition cognition, scene-specific information construction for the new scene, and enhancing the diverged logical information between scenes. We demonstrate SwAN's potential to optimize dynamic multi-scene recommendation problems by effectively online handling cold-start recommendations for any newly arrived scenes. More encouragingly, SwAN has been successfully deployed in Meituan's online catering recommendation service, which serves millions of customers per day, and SwAN has achieved a 5.64% CTR index improvement relative to the baselines and a 5.19% increase in daily order volume proportion.