Zida Cheng

Xu Chen, Zida Cheng, Yuangang Pan et al.

Existing click-through rate (CTR) prediction works have studied the role of feature interaction through a variety of techniques. Each interaction technique exhibits its own strength, and solely using one type usually constrains the model's capability to capture the complex feature relationships, especially for industrial data with enormous input feature fields. Recent research shows that effective CTR models often combine an MLP network with a dedicated feature interaction network in a two-parallel structure. However, the interplay and cooperative dynamics between different streams or branches remain under-researched. In this work, we introduce a novel Multi-Branch Cooperation Network (MBCnet) which enables multiple branch networks to collaborate with each other for better complex feature interaction modeling. Specifically, MBCnet consists of three branches: the Extensible Feature Grouping and Crossing (EFGC) branch that promotes the model's memorization ability of specific feature fields, the low rank Cross Net branch and Deep branch to enhance explicit and implicit feature crossing for improved generalization. Among these branches, a novel cooperation scheme is proposed based on two principles: Branch co-teaching and moderate differentiation. Branch co-teaching encourages well-learned branches to support poorly-learned ones on specific training samples. Moderate differentiation advocates branches to maintain a reasonable level of difference in their feature representations on the same inputs. This cooperation strategy improves learning through mutual knowledge sharing and boosts the discovery of diverse feature interactions across branches. Experiments on large-scale industrial datasets and online A/B test at Taobao app demonstrate MBCnet's superior performance, delivering a 0.09 point increase in CTR, 1.49% growth in deals, and 1.62% rise in GMV. Core codes are available online.

Zida Cheng, Siheng Chen, Ya Zhang

Spatio-temporal graph signal analysis has a significant impact on a wide range of applications, including hand/body pose action recognition. To achieve effective analysis, spatio-temporal graph convolutional networks (ST-GCN) leverage the powerful learning ability to achieve great empirical successes; however, those methods need a huge amount of high-quality training data and lack theoretical interpretation. To address this issue, the spatio-temporal graph scattering transform (ST-GST) was proposed to put forth a theoretically interpretable framework; however, the empirical performance of this approach is constrainted by the fully mathematical design. To benefit from both sides, this work proposes a novel complementary mechanism to organically combine the spatio-temporal graph scattering transform and neural networks, resulting in the proposed spatio-temporal graph complementary scattering networks (ST-GCSN). The essence is to leverage the mathematically designed graph wavelets with pruning techniques to cover major information and use trainable networks to capture complementary information. The empirical experiments on hand pose action recognition show that the proposed ST-GCSN outperforms both ST-GCN and ST-GST.

Zida Cheng, Siheng Chen, Ya Zhang

3D hand-object pose estimation is an important issue to understand the interaction between human and environment. Current hand-object pose estimation methods require detailed 3D labels, which are expensive and labor-intensive. To tackle the problem of data collection, we propose a semi-supervised 3D hand-object pose estimation method with two key techniques: pose dictionary learning and an object-oriented coordinate system. The proposed pose dictionary learning module can distinguish infeasible poses by reconstruction error, enabling unlabeled data to provide supervision signals. The proposed object-oriented coordinate system can make 3D estimations equivariant to the camera perspective. Experiments are conducted on FPHA and HO-3D datasets. Our method reduces estimation error by 19.5% / 24.9% for hands/objects compared to straightforward use of labeled data on FPHA and outperforms several baseline methods. Extensive experiments also validate the robustness of the proposed method.