Jiayi Liu

Yifan Liu, Wei Wei, Jiayi Liu et al. · microsoft-research

Endowing chatbots with a consistent personality plays a vital role for agents to deliver human-like interactions. However, existing personalized approaches commonly generate responses in light of static predefined personas depicted with textual description, which may severely restrict the interactivity of human and the chatbot, especially when the agent needs to answer the query excluded in the predefined personas, which is so-called out-of-predefined persona problem (named OOP for simplicity). To alleviate the problem, in this paper we propose a novel retrieval-to-prediction paradigm consisting of two subcomponents, namely, (1) Persona Retrieval Model (PRM), it retrieves a persona from a global collection based on a Natural Language Inference (NLI) model, the inferred persona is consistent with the predefined personas; and (2) Posterior-scored Transformer (PS-Transformer), it adopts a persona posterior distribution that further considers the actual personas used in the ground response, maximally mitigating the gap between training and inferring. Furthermore, we present a dataset called IT-ConvAI2 that first highlights the OOP problem in personalized dialogue. Extensive experiments on both IT-ConvAI2 and ConvAI2 demonstrate that our proposed model yields considerable improvements in both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

Jiayi Liu, Ali Mahdavi-Amiri, Manolis Savva

We address the task of simultaneous part-level reconstruction and motion parameter estimation for articulated objects. Given two sets of multi-view images of an object in two static articulation states, we decouple the movable part from the static part and reconstruct shape and appearance while predicting the motion parameters. To tackle this problem, we present PARIS: a self-supervised, end-to-end architecture that learns part-level implicit shape and appearance models and optimizes motion parameters jointly without any 3D supervision, motion, or semantic annotation. Our experiments show that our method generalizes better across object categories, and outperforms baselines and prior work that are given 3D point clouds as input. Our approach improves reconstruction relative to state-of-the-art baselines with a Chamfer-L1 distance reduction of 3.94 (45.2%) for objects and 26.79 (84.5%) for parts, and achieves 5% error rate for motion estimation across 10 object categories. Video summary at: https://youtu.be/tDSrROPCgUc

Zhongping Zhang, Yiwen Gu, Bryan A. Plummer et al.

Video-based movie genre classification has garnered considerable attention due to its various applications in recommendation systems. Prior work has typically addressed this task by adapting models from traditional video classification tasks, such as action recognition or event detection. However, these models often neglect language elements (e.g., narrations or conversations) present in videos, which can implicitly convey high-level semantics of movie genres, like storylines or background context. Additionally, existing approaches are primarily designed to encode the entire content of the input video, leading to inefficiencies in predicting movie genres. Movie genre prediction may require only a few shots to accurately determine the genres, rendering a comprehensive understanding of the entire video unnecessary. To address these challenges, we propose a Movie genre Classification method based on Language augmentatIon and shot samPling (Movie-CLIP). Movie-CLIP mainly consists of two parts: a language augmentation module to recognize language elements from the input audio, and a shot sampling module to select representative shots from the entire video. We evaluate our method on MovieNet and Condensed Movies datasets, achieving approximate 6-9% improvement in mean Average Precision (mAP) over the baselines. We also generalize Movie-CLIP to the scene boundary detection task, achieving 1.1% improvement in Average Precision (AP) over the state-of-the-art. We release our implementation at github.com/Zhongping-Zhang/Movie-CLIP.

Jiayi Liu, Qiaoyi Xue, Youdan Feng et al.

The escalating global cancer burden underscores the critical need for precise diagnostic tools in oncology. This research employs deep learning to enhance lesion segmentation in PET/CT imaging, utilizing a dataset of 900 whole-body FDG-PET/CT and 600 PSMA-PET/CT studies from the AutoPET challenge III. Our methodical approach includes robust preprocessing and data augmentation techniques to ensure model robustness and generalizability. We investigate the influence of non-zero normalization and modifications to the data augmentation pipeline, such as the introduction of RandGaussianSharpen and adjustments to the Gamma transform parameter. This study aims to contribute to the standardization of preprocessing and augmentation strategies in PET/CT imaging, potentially improving the diagnostic accuracy and the personalized management of cancer patients. Our code will be open-sourced and available at https://github.com/jiayiliu-pku/DC2024.

Jiayi Liu, Manolis Savva, Ali Mahdavi-Amiri

3D modeling of articulated objects is a research problem within computer vision, graphics, and robotics. Its objective is to understand the shape and motion of the articulated components, represent the geometry and mobility of object parts, and create realistic models that reflect articulated objects in the real world. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art in 3D modeling of articulated objects, with a specific focus on the task of articulated part perception and articulated object creation (reconstruction and generation). We systematically review and discuss the relevant literature from two perspectives: geometry modeling (i.e., structure and shape of articulated parts) and articulation modeling (i.e., dynamics and motion of parts). Through this survey, we highlight the substantial progress made in these areas, outline the ongoing challenges, and identify gaps for future research. Our survey aims to serve as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners in computer vision and graphics, offering insights into the complexities of articulated object modeling.

Xin Miao, Jiayi Liu, Huayan Wang et al.

Main subjects usually exist in the images or videos, as they are the objects that the photographer wants to highlight. Human viewers can easily identify them but algorithms often confuse them with other objects. Detecting the main subjects is an important technique to help machines understand the content of images and videos. We present a new dataset with the goal of training models to understand the layout of the objects and the context of the image then to find the main subjects among them. This is achieved in three aspects. By gathering images from movie shots created by directors with professional shooting skills, we collect the dataset with strong diversity, specifically, it contains 107\,700 images from 21\,540 movie shots. We labeled them with the bounding box labels for two classes: subject and non-subject foreground object. We present a detailed analysis of the dataset and compare the task with saliency detection and object detection. ImageSubject is the first dataset that tries to localize the subject in an image that the photographer wants to highlight. Moreover, we find the transformer-based detection model offers the best result among other popular model architectures. Finally, we discuss the potential applications and conclude with the importance of the dataset.

Xin Miao, Huayan Wang, Jun Fu et al.

Recent advances in generative models and adversarial training have enabled artificially generating artworks in various artistic styles. It is highly desirable to gain more control over the generated style in practice. However, artistic styles are unlike object categories -- there are a continuous spectrum of styles distinguished by subtle differences. Few works have been explored to capture the continuous spectrum of styles and apply it to a style generation task. In this paper, we propose to achieve this by embedding original artwork examples into a continuous style space. The style vectors are fed to the generator and discriminator to achieve fine-grained control. Our method can be used with common generative adversarial networks (such as StyleGAN). Experiments show that our method not only precisely controls the fine-grained artistic style but also improves image quality over vanilla StyleGAN as measured by FID.

Jayanta K Dutta, Jiayi Liu, Unmesh Kurup et al.

Deep learning has shown promising results on many machine learning tasks but DL models are often complex networks with large number of neurons and layers, and recently, complex layer structures known as building blocks. Finding the best deep model requires a combination of finding both the right architecture and the correct set of parameters appropriate for that architecture. In addition, this complexity (in terms of layer types, number of neurons, and number of layers) also present problems with generalization since larger networks are easier to overfit to the data. In this paper, we propose a search framework for finding effective architectural building blocks for convolutional neural networks (CNN). Our approach is much faster at finding models that are close to state-of-the-art in performance. In addition, the models discovered by our approach are also smaller than models discovered by similar techniques. We achieve these twin advantages by designing our search space in such a way that it searches over a reduced set of state-of-the-art building blocks for CNNs including residual block, inception block, inception-residual block, ResNeXt block and many others. We apply this technique to generate models for multiple image datasets and show that these models achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art (and even surpassing the state-of-the-art in one case). We also show that learned models are transferable between datasets.