Jian Dong

Chengpeng Chen, Zichao Guo, Haien Zeng et al.

Feature reuse has been a key technique in light-weight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) architecture design. Current methods usually utilize a concatenation operator to keep large channel numbers cheaply (thus large network capacity) by reusing feature maps from other layers. Although concatenation is parameters- and FLOPs-free, its computational cost on hardware devices is non-negligible. To address this, this paper provides a new perspective to realize feature reuse implicitly and more efficiently instead of concatenation. A novel hardware-efficient RepGhost module is proposed for implicit feature reuse via reparameterization, instead of using concatenation operator. Based on the RepGhost module, we develop our efficient RepGhost bottleneck and RepGhostNet. Experiments on ImageNet and COCO benchmarks demonstrate that our RepGhostNet is much more effective and efficient than GhostNet and MobileNetV3 on mobile devices. Specially, our RepGhostNet surpasses GhostNet 0.5x by 2.5% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet dataset with less parameters and comparable latency on an ARM-based mobile device. Code and model weights are available at https://github.com/ChengpengChen/RepGhost.

Jian Dong, Yisong Yu, Yapeng Zhang et al.

User behaviors on an e-commerce app not only contain different kinds of feedback on items but also sometimes imply the cognitive clue of the user's decision-making. For understanding the psychological procedure behind user decisions, we present the behavior path and propose to match the user's current behavior path with historical behavior paths to predict user behaviors on the app. Further, we design a deep neural network for behavior path matching and solve three difficulties in modeling behavior paths: sparsity, noise interference, and accurate matching of behavior paths. In particular, we leverage contrastive learning to augment user behavior paths, provide behavior path self-activation to alleviate the effect of noise, and adopt a two-level matching mechanism to identify the most appropriate candidate. Our model shows excellent performance on two real-world datasets, outperforming the state-of-the-art CTR model. Moreover, our model has been deployed on the Meituan food delivery platform and has accumulated 1.6% improvement in CTR and 1.8% improvement in advertising revenue.

Xiang Li, Shuwei Chen, Jian Dong et al.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is crucial in recommendation and online advertising systems. Existing methods usually model user behaviors, while ignoring the informative context which influences the user to make a click decision, e.g., click pages and pre-ranking candidates that inform inferences about user interests, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a Decision-Making Context Interaction Network (DCIN), which deploys a carefully designed Context Interaction Unit (CIU) to learn decision-making contexts and thus benefits CTR prediction. In addition, the relationship between different decision-making context sources is explored by the proposed Adaptive Interest Aggregation Unit (AIAU) to improve CTR prediction further. In the experiments on public and industrial datasets, DCIN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Notably, the model has obtained the improvement of CTR+2.9%/CPM+2.1%/GMV+1.5% for online A/B testing and served the main traffic of Meituan Waimai advertising system.

Shuwei Chen, Xiang Li, Jian Dong et al.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays a pivotal role in the success of recommendations. Inspired by the recent thriving of language models (LMs), a surge of works improve prediction by organizing user behavior data in a \textbf{textual} format and using LMs to understand user interest at a semantic level. While promising, these works have to truncate the textual data to reduce the quadratic computational overhead of self-attention in LMs. However, it has been studied that long user behavior data can significantly benefit CTR prediction. In addition, these works typically condense user diverse interests into a single feature vector, which hinders the expressive capability of the model. In this paper, we propose a \textbf{T}extual \textbf{B}ehavior-based \textbf{I}nterest Chunking \textbf{N}etwork (TBIN), which tackles the above limitations by combining an efficient locality-sensitive hashing algorithm and a shifted chunk-based self-attention. The resulting user diverse interests are dynamically activated, producing user interest representation towards the target item. Finally, the results of both offline and online experiments on real-world food recommendation platform demonstrate the effectiveness of TBIN.

Ping Lang, Xiongjun Fu, Marco Martorella et al.

Modern radar systems have high requirements in terms of accuracy, robustness and real-time capability when operating on increasingly complex electromagnetic environments. Traditional radar signal processing (RSP) methods have shown some limitations when meeting such requirements, particularly in matters of target classification. With the rapid development of machine learning (ML), especially deep learning, radar researchers have started integrating these new methods when solving RSP-related problems. This paper aims at helping researchers and practitioners to better understand the application of ML techniques to RSP-related problems by providing a comprehensive, structured and reasoned literature overview of ML-based RSP techniques. This work is amply introduced by providing general elements of ML-based RSP and by stating the motivations behind them. The main applications of ML-based RSP are then analysed and structured based on the application field. This paper then concludes with a series of open questions and proposed research directions, in order to indicate current gaps and potential future solutions and trends.

Xiaojie Jin, Xin Li, Huaxin Xiao et al.

In this work, we address the challenging video scene parsing problem by developing effective representation learning methods given limited parsing annotations. In particular, we contribute two novel methods that constitute a unified parsing framework. (1) \textbf{Predictive feature learning}} from nearly unlimited unlabeled video data. Different from existing methods learning features from single frame parsing, we learn spatiotemporal discriminative features by enforcing a parsing network to predict future frames and their parsing maps (if available) given only historical frames. In this way, the network can effectively learn to capture video dynamics and temporal context, which are critical clues for video scene parsing, without requiring extra manual annotations. (2) \textbf{Prediction steering parsing}} architecture that effectively adapts the learned spatiotemporal features to scene parsing tasks and provides strong guidance for any off-the-shelf parsing model to achieve better video scene parsing performance. Extensive experiments over two challenging datasets, Cityscapes and Camvid, have demonstrated the effectiveness of our methods by showing significant improvement over well-established baselines.

Xiaojie Jin, Yunpeng Chen, Jian Dong et al.

Intermediate features at different layers of a deep neural network are known to be discriminative for visual patterns of different complexities. However, most existing works ignore such cross-layer heterogeneities when classifying samples of different complexities. For example, if a training sample has already been correctly classified at a specific layer with high confidence, we argue that it is unnecessary to enforce rest layers to classify this sample correctly and a better strategy is to encourage those layers to focus on other samples. In this paper, we propose a layer-wise discriminative learning method to enhance the discriminative capability of a deep network by allowing its layers to work collaboratively for classification. Towards this target, we introduce multiple classifiers on top of multiple layers. Each classifier not only tries to correctly classify the features from its input layer, but also coordinates with other classifiers to jointly maximize the final classification performance. Guided by the other companion classifiers, each classifier learns to concentrate on certain training examples and boosts the overall performance. Allowing for end-to-end training, our method can be conveniently embedded into state-of-the-art deep networks. Experiments with multiple popular deep networks, including Network in Network, GoogLeNet and VGGNet, on scale-various object classification benchmarks, including CIFAR100, MNIST and ImageNet, and scene classification benchmarks, including MIT67, SUN397 and Places205, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. In addition, we also analyze the relationship between the proposed method and classical conditional random fields models.

Jianan Li, Yunchao Wei, Xiaodan Liang et al.

Modern deep neural network based object detection methods typically classify candidate proposals using their interior features. However, global and local surrounding contexts that are believed to be valuable for object detection are not fully exploited by existing methods yet. In this work, we take a step towards understanding what is a robust practice to extract and utilize contextual information to facilitate object detection in practice. Specifically, we consider the following two questions: "how to identify useful global contextual information for detecting a certain object?" and "how to exploit local context surrounding a proposal for better inferring its contents?". We provide preliminary answers to these questions through developing a novel Attention to Context Convolution Neural Network (AC-CNN) based object detection model. AC-CNN effectively incorporates global and local contextual information into the region-based CNN (e.g. Fast RCNN) detection model and provides better object detection performance. It consists of one attention-based global contextualized (AGC) sub-network and one multi-scale local contextualized (MLC) sub-network. To capture global context, the AGC sub-network recurrently generates an attention map for an input image to highlight useful global contextual locations, through multiple stacked Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layers. For capturing surrounding local context, the MLC sub-network exploits both the inside and outside contextual information of each specific proposal at multiple scales. The global and local context are then fused together for making the final decision for detection. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2007 and VOC 2012 well demonstrate the superiority of the proposed AC-CNN over well-established baselines. In particular, AC-CNN outperforms the popular Fast-RCNN by 2.0% and 2.2% on VOC 2007 and VOC 2012 in terms of mAP, respectively.

Xiaodan Liang, Si Liu, Xiaohui Shen et al.

In this work, the human parsing task, namely decomposing a human image into semantic fashion/body regions, is formulated as an Active Template Regression (ATR) problem, where the normalized mask of each fashion/body item is expressed as the linear combination of the learned mask templates, and then morphed to a more precise mask with the active shape parameters, including position, scale and visibility of each semantic region. The mask template coefficients and the active shape parameters together can generate the human parsing results, and are thus called the structure outputs for human parsing. The deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is utilized to build the end-to-end relation between the input human image and the structure outputs for human parsing. More specifically, the structure outputs are predicted by two separate networks. The first CNN network is with max-pooling, and designed to predict the template coefficients for each label mask, while the second CNN network is without max-pooling to preserve sensitivity to label mask position and accurately predict the active shape parameters. For a new image, the structure outputs of the two networks are fused to generate the probability of each label for each pixel, and super-pixel smoothing is finally used to refine the human parsing result. Comprehensive evaluations on a large dataset well demonstrate the significant superiority of the ATR framework over other state-of-the-arts for human parsing. In particular, the F1-score reaches $64.38\%$ by our ATR framework, significantly higher than $44.76\%$ based on the state-of-the-art algorithm.

Yunchao Wei, Wei Xia, Junshi Huang et al.

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has demonstrated promising performance in single-label image classification tasks. However, how CNN best copes with multi-label images still remains an open problem, mainly due to the complex underlying object layouts and insufficient multi-label training images. In this work, we propose a flexible deep CNN infrastructure, called Hypotheses-CNN-Pooling (HCP), where an arbitrary number of object segment hypotheses are taken as the inputs, then a shared CNN is connected with each hypothesis, and finally the CNN output results from different hypotheses are aggregated with max pooling to produce the ultimate multi-label predictions. Some unique characteristics of this flexible deep CNN infrastructure include: 1) no ground truth bounding box information is required for training; 2) the whole HCP infrastructure is robust to possibly noisy and/or redundant hypotheses; 3) no explicit hypothesis label is required; 4) the shared CNN may be well pre-trained with a large-scale single-label image dataset, e.g. ImageNet; and 5) it may naturally output multi-label prediction results. Experimental results on Pascal VOC2007 and VOC2012 multi-label image datasets well demonstrate the superiority of the proposed HCP infrastructure over other state-of-the-arts. In particular, the mAP reaches 84.2% by HCP only and 90.3% after the fusion with our complementary result in [47] based on hand-crafted features on the VOC2012 dataset, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts with a large margin of more than 7%.