Wenpeng Zhang

Weijie Li, Wei Yang, Li Liu et al.

In recent years, deep learning has been widely used in SAR ATR and achieved excellent performance on the MSTAR dataset. However, due to constrained imaging conditions, MSTAR has data biases such as background correlation, i.e., background clutter properties have a spurious correlation with target classes. Deep learning can overfit clutter to reduce training errors. Therefore, the degree of overfitting for clutter reflects the non-causality of deep learning in SAR ATR. Existing methods only qualitatively analyze this phenomenon. In this paper, we quantify the contributions of different regions to target recognition based on the Shapley value. The Shapley value of clutter measures the degree of overfitting. Moreover, we explain how data bias and model bias contribute to non-causality. Concisely, data bias leads to comparable signal-to-clutter ratios and clutter textures in training and test sets. And various model structures have different degrees of overfitting for these biases. The experimental results of various models under standard operating conditions on the MSTAR dataset support our conclusions. Our code is available at https://github.com/waterdisappear/Data-Bias-in-MSTAR.

Weijie Li, Wei Yang, Wenpeng Zhang et al.

Vehicle recognition is a fundamental problem in SAR image interpretation. However, robustly recognizing vehicle targets is a challenging task in SAR due to the large intraclass variations and small interclass variations. Additionally, the lack of large datasets further complicates the task. Inspired by the analysis of target signature variations and deep learning explainability, this paper proposes a novel domain alignment framework named the Hierarchical Disentanglement-Alignment Network (HDANet) to achieve robustness under various operating conditions. Concisely, HDANet integrates feature disentanglement and alignment into a unified framework with three modules: domain data generation, multitask-assisted mask disentanglement, and domain alignment of target features. The first module generates diverse data for alignment, and three simple but effective data augmentation methods are designed to simulate target signature variations. The second module disentangles the target features from background clutter using the multitask-assisted mask to prevent clutter from interfering with subsequent alignment. The third module employs a contrastive loss for domain alignment to extract robust target features from generated diverse data and disentangled features. Lastly, the proposed method demonstrates impressive robustness across nine operating conditions in the MSTAR dataset, and extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses validate the effectiveness of our framework.

Tianchi Cai, Jiyan Jiang, Wenpeng Zhang et al.

We study the budget allocation problem in online marketing campaigns that utilize previously collected offline data. We first discuss the long-term effect of optimizing marketing budget allocation decisions in the offline setting. To overcome the challenge, we propose a novel game-theoretic offline value-based reinforcement learning method using mixed policies. The proposed method reduces the need to store infinitely many policies in previous methods to only constantly many policies, which achieves nearly optimal policy efficiency, making it practical and favorable for industrial usage. We further show that this method is guaranteed to converge to the optimal policy, which cannot be achieved by previous value-based reinforcement learning methods for marketing budget allocation. Our experiments on a large-scale marketing campaign with tens-of-millions users and more than one billion budget verify the theoretical results and show that the proposed method outperforms various baseline methods. The proposed method has been successfully deployed to serve all the traffic of this marketing campaign.

Tianchi Cai, Shenliao Bao, Jiyan Jiang et al.

Model-free RL-based recommender systems have recently received increasing research attention due to their capability to handle partial feedback and long-term rewards. However, most existing research has ignored a critical feature in recommender systems: one user's feedback on the same item at different times is random. The stochastic rewards property essentially differs from that in classic RL scenarios with deterministic rewards, which makes RL-based recommender systems much more challenging. In this paper, we first demonstrate in a simulator environment where using direct stochastic feedback results in a significant drop in performance. Then to handle the stochastic feedback more efficiently, we design two stochastic reward stabilization frameworks that replace the direct stochastic feedback with that learned by a supervised model. Both frameworks are model-agnostic, i.e., they can effectively utilize various supervised models. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed frameworks over different RL-based recommendation baselines with extensive experiments on a recommendation simulator as well as an industrial-level recommender system.

Shangqu Yan, Chenyang Luo, Yaowen Fu et al.

Video synthetic aperture radar (ViSAR) has attracted substantial attention in the moving target detection (MTD) field due to its ability to continuously monitor changes in the target area. In ViSAR, the moving targets' shadows will not offset and defocus, which is widely used as a feature for MTD. However, the shadows are difficult to distinguish from the low scattering region in the background, which will cause more missing and false alarms. Therefore, it is worth investigating how to enhance the distinction between the shadows and background. In this study, we proposed the Shadow Enhancement and Background Suppression for ViSAR (SE-BSFV) algorithm. The SE-BSFV algorithm is based on the low-rank representation (LRR) theory and adopts online subspace learning technique to enhance shadows and suppress background for ViSAR images. Firstly, we use a registration algorithm to register the ViSAR images and utilize Gaussian mixture distribution (GMD) to model the ViSAR data. Secondly, the knowledge learned from the previous frames is leveraged to estimate the GMD parameters of the current frame, and the Expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is used to estimate the subspace parameters. Then, the foreground matrix of the current frame can be obtained. Finally, the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is used to eliminate strong scattering objects in the foreground matrix to obtain the final results. The experimental results indicate that the SE-BSFV algorithm significantly enhances the shadows' saliency and greatly improves the detection performance while ensuring efficiency compared with several other advanced pre-processing algorithms.

Runzhe Zhang, Letian Chen, Wenpeng Zhang et al.

We present FlowLM, a flow matching language model transformed from pre-trained diffusion language models via efficient fine-tuning. By re-aligning the curved sampling trajectories of diffusion models into straight-line flows, FlowLM enables high quality few-step generation that rivals or even outperforms the quality of 2,000-step diffusion sampling with very few training epochs. Remarkably, finetuned FlowLM reaches performance saturation with only half as many training epochs as training from scratch, both approaches greatly outperforming the original diffusion model, thereby validating our method. Furthermore, we validate a more effective training objective for flow matching: predicting clean data to consistently guide the sampling process towards the true data distribution. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach is highly effective for high-quality, few-step text generation.

Tianchi Cai, Wenpeng Zhang, Lihong Gu et al.

Although well-established in general reinforcement learning (RL), value-based methods are rarely explored in constrained RL (CRL) for their incapability of finding policies that can randomize among multiple actions. To apply value-based methods to CRL, a recent groundbreaking line of game-theoretic approaches uses the mixed policy that randomizes among a set of carefully generated policies to converge to the desired constraint-satisfying policy. However, these approaches require storing a large set of policies, which is not policy efficient, and may incur prohibitive memory costs in constrained deep RL. To address this problem, we propose an alternative approach. Our approach first reformulates the CRL to an equivalent distance optimization problem. With a specially designed linear optimization oracle, we derive a meta-algorithm that solves it using any off-the-shelf RL algorithm and any conditional gradient (CG) type algorithm as subroutines. We then propose a new variant of the CG-type algorithm, which generalizes the minimum norm point (MNP) method. The proposed method matches the convergence rate of the existing game-theoretic approaches and achieves the worst-case optimal policy efficiency. The experiments on a navigation task show that our method reduces the memory costs by an order of magnitude, and meanwhile achieves better performance, demonstrating both its effectiveness and efficiency.

Wenpeng Zhang, Xiao Lin, Peilin Zhao

Factorization Machine (FM) is a supervised learning approach with a powerful capability of feature engineering. It yields state-of-the-art performance in various batch learning tasks where all the training data is made available prior to the training. However, in real-world applications where the data arrives sequentially in a streaming manner, the high cost of re-training with batch learning algorithms has posed formidable challenges in the online learning scenario. The initial challenge is that no prior formulations of FM could fulfill the requirements in Online Convex Optimization (OCO) -- the paramount framework for online learning algorithm design. To address the aforementioned challenge, we invent a new convexification scheme leading to a Compact Convexified FM (CCFM) that seamlessly meets the requirements in OCO. However for learning Compact Convexified FM (CCFM) in the online learning setting, most existing algorithms suffer from expensive projection operations. To address this subsequent challenge, we follow the general projection-free algorithmic framework of Online Conditional Gradient and propose an Online Compact Convex Factorization Machine (OCCFM) algorithm that eschews the projection operation with efficient linear optimization steps. In support of the proposed OCCFM in terms of its theoretical foundation, we prove that the developed algorithm achieves a sub-linear regret bound. To evaluate the empirical performance of OCCFM, we conduct extensive experiments on 6 real-world datasets for online recommendation and binary classification tasks. The experimental results show that OCCFM outperforms the state-of-art online learning algorithms.