Tao Zhang

Zhongfen Deng, Hao Peng, Tao Zhang et al.

Product attribute value extraction is an important task in e-Commerce which can help several downstream applications such as product search and recommendation. Most previous models handle this task using sequence labeling or question answering method which rely on the sequential position information of values in the product text and are vulnerable to data discrepancy between training and testing. This limits their generalization ability to real-world scenario in which each product can have multiple descriptions across various shopping platforms with different composition of text and style. They also have limited zero-shot ability to new values. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning model with value generation/classification and attribute prediction called JPAVE to predict values without the necessity of position information of values in the text. Furthermore, the copy mechanism in value generator and the value attention module in value classifier help our model address the data discrepancy issue by only focusing on the relevant part of input text and ignoring other information which causes the discrepancy issue such as sentence structure in the text. Besides, two variants of our model are designed for open-world and closed-world scenarios. In addition, copy mechanism introduced in the first variant based on value generation can improve its zero-shot ability for identifying unseen values. Experimental results on a public dataset demonstrate the superiority of our model compared with strong baselines and its generalization ability of predicting new values.

Tao Zhang, Xiangtai Li, Hao Fei et al.

Current universal segmentation methods demonstrate strong capabilities in pixel-level image and video understanding. However, they lack reasoning abilities and cannot be controlled via text instructions. In contrast, large vision-language multimodal models exhibit powerful vision-based conversation and reasoning capabilities but lack pixel-level understanding and have difficulty accepting visual prompts for flexible user interaction. This paper proposes OMG-LLaVA, a new and elegant framework combining powerful pixel-level vision understanding with reasoning abilities. It can accept various visual and text prompts for flexible user interaction. Specifically, we use a universal segmentation method as the visual encoder, integrating image information, perception priors, and visual prompts into visual tokens provided to the LLM. The LLM is responsible for understanding the user's text instructions and providing text responses and pixel-level segmentation results based on the visual information. We propose perception prior embedding to better integrate perception priors with image features. OMG-LLaVA achieves image-level, object-level, and pixel-level reasoning and understanding in a single model, matching or surpassing the performance of specialized methods on multiple benchmarks. Rather than using LLM to connect each specialist, our work aims at end-to-end training on one encoder, one decoder, and one LLM. The code and model have been released for further research.

Tao Zhang, Yang Cong, Gan Sun et al.

Object clustering, aiming at grouping similar objects into one cluster with an unsupervised strategy, has been extensivelystudied among various data-driven applications. However, most existing state-of-the-art object clustering methods (e.g., single-view or multi-view clustering methods) only explore visual information, while ignoring one of most important sensing modalities, i.e., tactile information which can help capture different object properties and further boost the performance of object clustering task. To effectively benefit both visual and tactile modalities for object clustering, in this paper, we propose a deep Auto-Encoder-like Non-negative Matrix Factorization framework for visual-tactile fusion clustering. Specifically, deep matrix factorization constrained by an under-complete Auto-Encoder-like architecture is employed to jointly learn hierarchical expression of visual-tactile fusion data, and preserve the local structure of data generating distribution of visual and tactile modalities. Meanwhile, a graph regularizer is introduced to capture the intrinsic relations of data samples within each modality. Furthermore, we propose a modality-level consensus regularizer to effectively align thevisual and tactile data in a common subspace in which the gap between visual and tactile data is mitigated. For the model optimization, we present an efficient alternating minimization strategy to solve our proposed model. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on public datasets to verify the effectiveness of our framework.