Hao Wang

Ziqian Lin, Hao Ding, Nghia Trong Hoang et al.

Recent studies on pre-trained vision/language models have demonstrated the practical benefit of a new, promising solution-building paradigm in AI where models can be pre-trained on broad data describing a generic task space and then adapted successfully to solve a wide range of downstream tasks, even when training data is severely limited (e.g., in zero- or few-shot learning scenarios). Inspired by such progress, we investigate in this paper the possibilities and challenges of adapting such a paradigm to the context of recommender systems, which is less investigated from the perspective of pre-trained model. In particular, we propose to develop a generic recommender that captures universal interaction patterns by training on generic user-item interaction data extracted from different domains, which can then be fast adapted to improve few-shot learning performance in unseen new domains (with limited data). However, unlike vision/language data which share strong conformity in the semantic space, universal patterns underlying recommendation data collected across different domains (e.g., different countries or different E-commerce platforms) are often occluded by both in-domain and cross-domain biases implicitly imposed by the cultural differences in their user and item bases, as well as their uses of different e-commerce platforms. As shown in our experiments, such heterogeneous biases in the data tend to hinder the effectiveness of the pre-trained model. To address this challenge, we further introduce and formalize a causal debiasing perspective, which is substantiated via a hierarchical Bayesian deep learning model, named PreRec. Our empirical studies on real-world data show that the proposed model could significantly improve the recommendation performance in zero- and few-shot learning settings under both cross-market and cross-platform scenarios.

Hao Wang, Qingshan Xu, Hongyuan Chen et al.

Recent techniques on implicit geometry representation learning and neural rendering have shown promising results for 3D clothed human reconstruction from sparse video inputs. However, it is still challenging to reconstruct detailed surface geometry and even more difficult to synthesize photorealistic novel views with animated human poses. In this work, we introduce PGAHum, a prior-guided geometry and appearance learning framework for high-fidelity animatable human reconstruction. We thoroughly exploit 3D human priors in three key modules of PGAHum to achieve high-quality geometry reconstruction with intricate details and photorealistic view synthesis on unseen poses. First, a prior-based implicit geometry representation of 3D human, which contains a delta SDF predicted by a tri-plane network and a base SDF derived from the prior SMPL model, is proposed to model the surface details and the body shape in a disentangled manner. Second, we introduce a novel prior-guided sampling strategy that fully leverages the prior information of the human pose and body to sample the query points within or near the body surface. By avoiding unnecessary learning in the empty 3D space, the neural rendering can recover more appearance details. Last, we propose a novel iterative backward deformation strategy to progressively find the correspondence for the query point in observation space. A skinning weights prediction model is learned based on the prior provided by the SMPL model to achieve the iterative backward LBS deformation. Extensive quantitative and qualitative comparisons on various datasets are conducted and the results demonstrate the superiority of our framework. Ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of each scheme for geometry and appearance learning.