Zhiqiang Zhang

Zhouyu Jiang, Mengshu Sun, Lei Liang et al.

Multi-hop question answering is a challenging task with distinct industrial relevance, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods based on large language models (LLMs) have become a popular approach to tackle this task. Owing to the potential inability to retrieve all necessary information in a single iteration, a series of iterative RAG methods has been recently developed, showing significant performance improvements. However, existing methods still face two critical challenges: context overload resulting from multiple rounds of retrieval, and over-planning and repetitive planning due to the lack of a recorded retrieval trajectory. In this paper, we propose a novel iterative RAG method called ReSP, equipped with a dual-function summarizer. This summarizer compresses information from retrieved documents, targeting both the overarching question and the current sub-question concurrently. Experimental results on the multi-hop question-answering datasets HotpotQA and 2WikiMultihopQA demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art, and exhibits excellent robustness concerning context length.

Ryugo Morita, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jinjia Zhou

Background-Induced Text2Image (BIT2I) aims to generate foreground content according to the text on the given background image. Most studies focus on generating high-quality foreground content, although they ignore the relationship between the two contents. In this study, we analyzed a novel Background-Aware Text2Image (BAT2I) task in which the generated content matches the input background. We proposed a Background-Aware Text to Image synthesis and manipulation Network (BATINet), which contains two key components: Position Detect Network (PDN) and Harmonize Network (HN). The PDN detects the most plausible position of the text-relevant object in the background image. The HN harmonizes the generated content referring to background style information. Finally, we reconstructed the generation network, which consists of the multi-GAN and attention module to match more user preferences. Moreover, we can apply BATINet to text-guided image manipulation. It solves the most challenging task of manipulating the shape of an object. We demonstrated through qualitative and quantitative evaluations on the CUB dataset that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Ryugo Morita, Zhiqiang Zhang, Man M. Ho et al.

Recently, text-guided image manipulation has received increasing attention in the research field of multimedia processing and computer vision due to its high flexibility and controllability. Its goal is to semantically manipulate parts of an input reference image according to the text descriptions. However, most of the existing works have the following problems: (1) text-irrelevant content cannot always be maintained but randomly changed, (2) the performance of image manipulation still needs to be further improved, (3) only can manipulate descriptive attributes. To solve these problems, we propose a novel image manipulation method that interactively edits an image using complex text instructions. It allows users to not only improve the accuracy of image manipulation but also achieve complex tasks such as enlarging, dwindling, or removing objects and replacing the background with the input image. To make these tasks possible, we apply three strategies. First, the given image is divided into text-relevant content and text-irrelevant content. Only the text-relevant content is manipulated and the text-irrelevant content can be maintained. Second, a super-resolution method is used to enlarge the manipulation region to further improve the operability and to help manipulate the object itself. Third, a user interface is introduced for editing the segmentation map interactively to re-modify the generated image according to the user's desires. Extensive experiments on the Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011 (CUB) dataset and Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MS COCO) datasets demonstrate our proposed method can enable interactive, flexible, and accurate image manipulation in real-time. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we show that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Jun Xu, Mengshu Sun, Zhiqiang Zhang et al.

Recent advancements in large language models have shown impressive performance in general chat. However, their domain-specific capabilities, particularly in information extraction, have certain limitations. Extracting structured information from natural language that deviates from known schemas or instructions has proven challenging for previous prompt-based methods. This motivated us to explore domain-specific modeling in chat-based language models as a solution for extracting structured information from natural language. In this paper, we present ChatUIE, an innovative unified information extraction framework built upon ChatGLM. Simultaneously, reinforcement learning is employed to improve and align various tasks that involve confusing and limited samples. Furthermore, we integrate generation constraints to address the issue of generating elements that are not present in the input. Our experimental results demonstrate that ChatUIE can significantly improve the performance of information extraction with a slight decrease in chatting ability.

Shiyao Wang, Qi Liu, Tiezheng Ge et al.

Creative plays a great important role in e-commerce for exhibiting products. Sellers usually create multiple creatives for comprehensive demonstrations, thus it is crucial to display the most appealing design to maximize the Click-Through Rate~(CTR). For this purpose, modern recommender systems dynamically rank creatives when a product is proposed for a user. However, this task suffers more cold-start problem than conventional products recommendation In this paper, we propose a hybrid bandit model with visual priors which first makes predictions with a visual evaluation, and then naturally evolves to focus on the specialities through the hybrid bandit model. Our contributions are three-fold: 1) We present a visual-aware ranking model (called VAM) that incorporates a list-wise ranking loss for ordering the creatives according to the visual appearance. 2) Regarding visual evaluations as a prior, the hybrid bandit model (called HBM) is proposed to evolve consistently to make better posteriori estimations by taking more observations into consideration for online scenarios. 3) A first large-scale creative dataset, CreativeRanking, is constructed, which contains over 1.7M creatives of 500k products as well as their real impression and click data. Extensive experiments have also been conducted on both our dataset and public Mushroom dataset, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Haiyang Si, Zhiqiang Zhang, Feifan Lv et al.

Real-time semantic segmentation plays a significant role in industry applications, such as autonomous driving, robotics and so on. It is a challenging task as both efficiency and performance need to be considered simultaneously. To address such a complex task, this paper proposes an efficient CNN called Multiply Spatial Fusion Network (MSFNet) to achieve fast and accurate perception. The proposed MSFNet uses Class Boundary Supervision to process the relevant boundary information based on our proposed Multi-features Fusion Module which can obtain spatial information and enlarge receptive field. Therefore, the final upsampling of the feature maps of 1/8 original image size can achieve impressive results while maintaining a high speed. Experiments on Cityscapes and Camvid datasets show an obvious advantage of the proposed approach compared with the existing approaches. Specifically, it achieves 77.1% Mean IOU on the Cityscapes test dataset with the speed of 41 FPS for a 1024*2048 input, and 75.4% Mean IOU with the speed of 91 FPS on the Camvid test dataset.

Bo Wang, Quan Chen, Min Zhou et al.

Feature matters for salient object detection. Existing methods mainly focus on designing a sophisticated structure to incorporate multi-level features and filter out cluttered features. We present Progressive Feature Polishing Network (PFPN), a simple yet effective framework to progressively polish the multi-level features to be more accurate and representative. By employing multiple Feature Polishing Modules (FPMs) in a recurrent manner, our approach is able to detect salient objects with fine details without any post-processing. A FPM parallelly updates the features of each level by directly incorporating all higher level context information. Moreover, it can keep the dimensions and hierarchical structures of the feature maps, which makes it flexible to be integrated with any CNN-based models. Empirical experiments show that our results are monotonically getting better with increasing number of FPMs. Without bells and whistles, PFPN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly on five benchmark datasets under various evaluation metrics.

Tiezheng Ge, Liqin Zhao, Guorui Zhou et al.

In Taobao, the largest e-commerce platform in China, billions of items are provided and typically displayed with their images. For better user experience and business effectiveness, Click Through Rate (CTR) prediction in online advertising system exploits abundant user historical behaviors to identify whether a user is interested in a candidate ad. Enhancing behavior representations with user behavior images will help understand user's visual preference and improve the accuracy of CTR prediction greatly. So we propose to model user preference jointly with user behavior ID features and behavior images. However, training with user behavior images brings tens to hundreds of images in one sample, giving rise to a great challenge in both communication and computation. To handle these challenges, we propose a novel and efficient distributed machine learning paradigm called Advanced Model Server (AMS). With the well known Parameter Server (PS) framework, each server node handles a separate part of parameters and updates them independently. AMS goes beyond this and is designed to be capable of learning a unified image descriptor model shared by all server nodes which embeds large images into low dimensional high level features before transmitting images to worker nodes. AMS thus dramatically reduces the communication load and enables the arduous joint training process. Based on AMS, the methods of effectively combining the images and ID features are carefully studied, and then we propose a Deep Image CTR Model. Our approach is shown to achieve significant improvements in both online and offline evaluations, and has been deployed in Taobao display advertising system serving the main traffic.