Qin Zhou

Kun He, Xin Liu, Yichen Yang et al.

Adversarial training has been demonstrated to be the most effective approach to defend against adversarial attacks. However, existing adversarial training methods show apparent oscillations and overfitting issue in the training process, degrading the defense efficacy. In this work, we propose a novel framework, termed Parameter Interpolation based Adversarial Training (PIAT), that makes full use of the historical information during training. Specifically, at the end of each epoch, PIAT tunes the model parameters as the interpolation of the parameters of the previous and current epochs. Besides, we suggest to use the Normalized Mean Square Error (NMSE) to further improve the robustness by aligning the clean and adversarial examples. Compared with other regularization methods, NMSE focuses more on the relative magnitude of the logits rather than the absolute magnitude. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets and various networks show that our method could prominently improve the model robustness and reduce the generalization error. Moreover, our framework is general and could further boost the robust accuracy when combined with other adversarial training methods.

Kangqing Ye, Peng Liu, Xiaoyang Zou et al.

Three-dimensional (3D) integrated renal structures (IRS) segmentation is important in clinical practice. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, many powerful frameworks focusing on medical image segmentation are proposed. In this challenge, we utilized the nnU-Net framework, which is the state-of-the-art method for medical image segmentation. To reduce the outlier prediction for the tumor label, we combine contour regularization (CR) loss of the tumor label with Dice loss and cross-entropy loss to improve this phenomenon.

Xinzhe Li, Qianru Sun, Yaoyao Liu et al.

Few-shot classification (FSC) is challenging due to the scarcity of labeled training data (e.g. only one labeled data point per class). Meta-learning has shown to achieve promising results by learning to initialize a classification model for FSC. In this paper we propose a novel semi-supervised meta-learning method called learning to self-train (LST) that leverages unlabeled data and specifically meta-learns how to cherry-pick and label such unsupervised data to further improve performance. To this end, we train the LST model through a large number of semi-supervised few-shot tasks. On each task, we train a few-shot model to predict pseudo labels for unlabeled data, and then iterate the self-training steps on labeled and pseudo-labeled data with each step followed by fine-tuning. We additionally learn a soft weighting network (SWN) to optimize the self-training weights of pseudo labels so that better ones can contribute more to gradient descent optimization. We evaluate our LST method on two ImageNet benchmarks for semi-supervised few-shot classification and achieve large improvements over the state-of-the-art method. Code is at https://github.com/xinzheli1217/learning-to-self-train.

Zhou Qin, Kai Yuan, Pratik Lahiri et al.

In a typical e-commerce setting, Content Ranking Optimization (CRO) mechanisms are employed to surface content on the search page to fulfill customers' shopping missions. CRO commonly utilizes models such as contextual deep bandits model to independently rank content at different positions, e.g., one optimizer dedicated to organic search results and another to sponsored results. However, this regional optimization approach does not necessarily translate to whole page optimization, e.g., maximizing revenue at the top of the page may inadvertently diminish the revenue of lower positions. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning based method for whole page ranking to jointly optimize across all positions by: 1) shifting from position level optimization to whole page level optimization to achieve an overall optimized ranking; 2) applying reinforcement learning to optimize for the cumulative rewards instead of the instant reward. We formulate page level CRO as a cooperative Multi-agent Markov Decision Process , and address it with the novel Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG) model. MADDPG supports a flexible and scalable joint optimization framework by adopting a "centralized training and decentralized execution" approach. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MADDPG scales to a 2.5 billion action space in the public Mujoco environment, and outperforms the deep bandits modeling by 25.7% on the offline CRO data set from a leading e-commerce company. We foresee that this novel multi-agent optimization is applicable to similar joint optimization problems in the field of information retrieval.

Chuang Liu, Hua Yang, Qin Zhou et al.

Person search unifies person detection and person re-identification (Re-ID) to locate query persons from the panoramic gallery images. One major challenge comes from the imbalanced long-tail person identity distributions, which prevents the one-step person search model from learning discriminative person features for the final re-identification. However, it is under-explored how to solve the heavy imbalanced identity distributions for the one-step person search. Techniques designed for the long-tail classification task, for example, image-level re-sampling strategies, are hard to be effectively applied to the one-step person search which jointly solves person detection and Re-ID subtasks with a detection-based multi-task framework. To tackle this problem, we propose a Subtask-dominated Transfer Learning (STL) method. The STL method solves the long-tail problem in the pretraining stage of the dominated Re-ID subtask and improves the one-step person search by transfer learning of the pretrained model. We further design a Multi-level RoI Fusion Pooling layer to enhance the discrimination ability of person features for the one-step person search. Extensive experiments on CUHK-SYSU and PRW datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Chuang Liu, Hua Yang, Qin Zhou et al.

Person search is an extended task of person re-identification (Re-ID). However, most existing one-step person search works have not studied how to employ existing advanced Re-ID models to boost the one-step person search performance due to the integration of person detection and Re-ID. To address this issue, we propose a faster and stronger one-step person search framework, the Teacher-guided Disentangling Networks (TDN), to make the one-step person search enjoy the merits of the existing Re-ID researches. The proposed TDN can significantly boost the person search performance by transferring the advanced person Re-ID knowledge to the person search model. In the proposed TDN, for better knowledge transfer from the Re-ID teacher model to the one-step person search model, we design a strong one-step person search base framework by partially disentangling the two subtasks. Besides, we propose a Knowledge Transfer Bridge module to bridge the scale gap caused by different input formats between the Re-ID model and one-step person search model. During testing, we further propose the Ranking with Context Persons strategy to exploit the context information in panoramic images for better retrieval. Experiments on two public person search datasets demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed method.

Zhigang Chang, Qin Zhou, Mingyang Yu et al.

To learn the optimal similarity function between probe and gallery images in Person re-identification, effective deep metric learning methods have been extensively explored to obtain discriminative feature embedding. However, existing metric loss like triplet loss and its variants always emphasize pair-wise relations but ignore the distribution context in feature space, leading to inconsistency and sub-optimal. In fact, the similarity of one pair not only decides the match of this pair, but also has potential impacts on other sample pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel Distribution Context Aware (DCA) loss based on triplet loss to combine both numerical similarity and relation similarity in feature space for better clustering. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks including Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID and MSMT17, evidence the favorable performance of our method against the corresponding baseline and other state-of-the-art methods.

Qin Zhou, Heng Fan, Hua Yang et al.

Spatial misalignment caused by variations in poses and viewpoints is one of the most critical issues that hinders the performance improvement in existing person re-identification (Re-ID) algorithms. To address this problem, in this paper, we present a robust and efficient graph correspondence transfer (REGCT) approach for explicit spatial alignment in Re-ID. Specifically, we propose to establish the patch-wise correspondences of positive training pairs via graph matching. By exploiting both spatial and visual contexts of human appearance in graph matching, meaningful semantic correspondences can be obtained. To circumvent the cumbersome \emph{on-line} graph matching in testing phase, we propose to transfer the \emph{off-line} learned patch-wise correspondences from the positive training pairs to test pairs. In detail, for each test pair, the training pairs with similar pose-pair configurations are selected as references. The matching patterns (i.e., the correspondences) of the selected references are then utilized to calculate the patch-wise feature distances of this test pair. To enhance the robustness of correspondence transfer, we design a novel pose context descriptor to accurately model human body configurations, and present an approach to measure the similarity between a pair of pose context descriptors. Meanwhile, to improve testing efficiency, we propose a correspondence template ensemble method using the voting mechanism, which significantly reduces the amount of patch-wise matchings involved in distance calculation. With aforementioned strategies, the REGCT model can effectively and efficiently handle the spatial misalignment problem in Re-ID. Extensive experiments on five challenging benchmarks, including VIPeR, Road, PRID450S, 3DPES and CUHK01, evidence the superior performance of REGCT over other state-of-the-art approaches.

Zhigang Chang, Qin Zhou, Heng Fan et al.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated dominant performance in person re-identification (Re-ID). Existing CNN based methods utilize global average pooling (GAP) to aggregate intermediate convolutional features for Re-ID. However, this strategy only considers the first-order statistics of local features and treats local features at different locations equally important, leading to sub-optimal feature representation. To deal with these issues, we propose a novel weighted bilinear coding (WBC) framework for local feature aggregation in CNN networks to pursue more representative and discriminative feature representations, which can adapt to other state-of-the-art methods and improve their performance. In specific, bilinear coding is used to encode the channel-wise feature correlations to capture richer feature interactions. Meanwhile, a weighting scheme is applied on the bilinear coding to adaptively adjust the weights of local features at different locations based on their importance in recognition, further improving the discriminability of feature aggregation. To handle the spatial misalignment issue, we use a salient part net (spatial attention module) to derive salient body parts, and apply the WBC model on each part. The final representation, formed by concatenating the WBC encoded features of each part, is both discriminative and resistant to spatial misalignment. Experiments on three benchmarks including Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID and CUHK03 evidence the favorable performance of our method against other outstanding methods.