For better user experience and business effectiveness, Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction has been one of the most important tasks in E-commerce. Although extensive CTR prediction models have been proposed, learning good representation of items from multimodal features is still less investigated, considering an item in E-commerce usually contains multiple heterogeneous modalities. Previous works either concatenate the multiple modality features, that is equivalent to giving a fixed importance weight to each modality; or learn dynamic weights of different modalities for different items through technique like attention mechanism. However, a problem is that there usually exists common redundant information across multiple modalities. The dynamic weights of different modalities computed by using the redundant information may not correctly reflect the different importance of each modality. To address this, we explore the complementarity and redundancy of modalities by considering modality-specific and modality-invariant features differently. We propose a novel Multimodal Adversarial Representation Network (MARN) for the CTR prediction task. A multimodal attention network first calculates the weights of multiple modalities for each item according to its modality-specific features. Then a multimodal adversarial network learns modality-invariant representations where a double-discriminators strategy is introduced. Finally, we achieve the multimodal item representations by combining both modality-specific and modality-invariant representations. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets, and the proposed method consistently achieves remarkable improvements to the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the approach has been deployed in an operational E-commerce system and online A/B testing further demonstrates the effectiveness.
Human pose estimation - the process of recognizing human keypoints in a given image - is one of the most important tasks in computer vision and has a wide range of applications including movement diagnostics, surveillance, or self-driving vehicle. The accuracy of human keypoint prediction is increasingly improved thanks to the burgeoning development of deep learning. Most existing methods solved human pose estimation by generating heatmaps in which the ith heatmap indicates the location confidence of the ith keypoint. In this paper, we introduce novel network structures referred to as multiresolution representation learning for human keypoint prediction. At different resolutions in the learning process, our networks branch off and use extra layers to learn heatmap generation. We firstly consider the architectures for generating the multiresolution heatmaps after obtaining the lowest-resolution feature maps. Our second approach allows learning during the process of feature extraction in which the heatmaps are generated at each resolution of the feature extractor. The first and second approaches are referred to as multi-resolution heatmap learning and multi-resolution feature map learning respectively. Our architectures are simple yet effective, achieving good performance. We conducted experiments on two common benchmarks for human pose estimation: MS-COCO and MPII dataset.
We present a new method to learn video representations from large-scale unlabeled video data. Ideally, this representation will be generic and transferable, directly usable for new tasks such as action recognition and zero or few-shot learning. We formulate unsupervised representation learning as a multi-modal, multi-task learning problem, where the representations are shared across different modalities via distillation. Further, we introduce the concept of loss function evolution by using an evolutionary search algorithm to automatically find optimal combination of loss functions capturing many (self-supervised) tasks and modalities. Thirdly, we propose an unsupervised representation evaluation metric using distribution matching to a large unlabeled dataset as a prior constraint, based on Zipf's law. This unsupervised constraint, which is not guided by any labeling, produces similar results to weakly-supervised, task-specific ones. The proposed unsupervised representation learning results in a single RGB network and outperforms previous methods. Notably, it is also more effective than several label-based methods (e.g., ImageNet), with the exception of large, fully labeled video datasets.
Mining graph data has become a popular research topic in computer science and has been widely studied in both academia and industry given the increasing amount of network data in the recent years. However, the huge amount of network data has posed great challenges for efficient analysis. This motivates the advent of graph representation which maps the graph into a low-dimension vector space, keeping original graph structure and supporting graph inference. The investigation on efficient representation of a graph has profound theoretical significance and important realistic meaning, we therefore introduce some basic ideas in graph representation/network embedding as well as some representative models in this chapter.
Deep learning has revolutionized speech recognition, image recognition, and natural language processing since 2010, each involving a single modality in the input signal. However, many applications in artificial intelligence involve more than one modality. It is therefore of broad interest to study the more difficult and complex problem of modeling and learning across multiple modalities. In this paper, a technical review of the models and learning methods for multimodal intelligence is provided. The main focus is the combination of vision and natural language, which has become an important area in both computer vision and natural language processing research communities. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of recent work on multimodal deep learning from three new angles - learning multimodal representations, the fusion of multimodal signals at various levels, and multimodal applications. On multimodal representation learning, we review the key concept of embedding, which unifies the multimodal signals into the same vector space and thus enables cross-modality signal processing. We also review the properties of the many types of embedding constructed and learned for general downstream tasks. On multimodal fusion, this review focuses on special architectures for the integration of the representation of unimodal signals for a particular task. On applications, selected areas of a broad interest in current literature are covered, including caption generation, text-to-image generation, and visual question answering. We believe this review can facilitate future studies in the emerging field of multimodal intelligence for the community.
Incompleteness is a common problem for existing knowledge graphs (KGs), and the completion of KG which aims to predict links between entities is challenging. Most existing KG completion methods only consider the direct relation between nodes and ignore the relation paths which contain useful information for link prediction. Recently, a few methods take relation paths into consideration but pay less attention to the order of relations in paths which is important for reasoning. In addition, these path-based models always ignore nonlinear contributions of path features for link prediction. To solve these problems, we propose a novel KG completion method named OPTransE. Instead of embedding both entities of a relation into the same latent space as in previous methods, we project the head entity and the tail entity of each relation into different spaces to guarantee the order of relations in the path. Meanwhile, we adopt a pooling strategy to extract nonlinear and complex features of different paths to further improve the performance of link prediction. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed model OPTransE performs better than state-of-the-art methods.
For many computer vision applications such as image captioning, visual question answering, and person search, learning discriminative feature representations at both image and text level is an essential yet challenging problem. Its challenges originate from the large word variance in the text domain as well as the difficulty of accurately measuring the distance between the features of the two modalities. Most prior work focuses on the latter challenge, by introducing loss functions that help the network learn better feature representations but fail to account for the complexity of the textual input. With that in mind, we introduce TIMAM: a Text-Image Modality Adversarial Matching approach that learns modality-invariant feature representations using adversarial and cross-modal matching objectives. In addition, we demonstrate that BERT, a publicly-available language model that extracts word embeddings, can successfully be applied in the text-to-image matching domain. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art cross-modal matching performance on four widely-used publicly-available datasets resulting in absolute improvements ranging from 2% to 5% in terms of rank-1 accuracy.
Graph embedding aims to transfer a graph into vectors to facilitate subsequent graph analytics tasks like link prediction and graph clustering. Most approaches on graph embedding focus on preserving the graph structure or minimizing the reconstruction errors for graph data. They have mostly overlooked the embedding distribution of the latent codes, which unfortunately may lead to inferior representation in many cases. In this paper, we present a novel adversarially regularized framework for graph embedding. By employing the graph convolutional network as an encoder, our framework embeds the topological information and node content into a vector representation, from which a graph decoder is further built to reconstruct the input graph. The adversarial training principle is applied to enforce our latent codes to match a prior Gaussian or Uniform distribution. Based on this framework, we derive two variants of adversarial models, the adversarially regularized graph autoencoder (ARGA) and its variational version, adversarially regularized variational graph autoencoder (ARVGA), to learn the graph embedding effectively. We also exploit other potential variations of ARGA and ARVGA to get a deeper understanding on our designs. Experimental results compared among twelve algorithms for link prediction and twenty algorithms for graph clustering validate our solutions.
Person re-identification (PReID) has received increasing attention due to it is an important part in intelligent surveillance. Recently, many state-of-the-art methods on PReID are part-based deep models. Most of them focus on learning the part feature representation of person body in horizontal direction. However, the feature representation of body in vertical direction is usually ignored. Besides, the spatial information between these part features and the different feature channels is not considered. In this study, we introduce a multi-branches deep model for PReID. Specifically, the model consists of five branches. Among the five branches, two of them learn the local feature with spatial information from horizontal or vertical orientations, respectively. The other one aims to learn interdependencies knowledge between different feature channels generated by the last convolution layer. The remains of two other branches are identification and triplet sub-networks, in which the discriminative global feature and a corresponding measurement can be learned simultaneously. All the five branches can improve the representation learning. We conduct extensive comparative experiments on three PReID benchmarks including CUHK03, Market-1501 and DukeMTMC-reID. The proposed deep framework outperforms many state-of-the-art in most cases.
Person re-identification (ReID) aims at matching persons across different views/scenes. In addition to accuracy, the matching efficiency has received more and more attention because of demanding applications using large-scale data. Several binary coding based methods have been proposed for efficient ReID, which either learn projections to map high-dimensional features to compact binary codes, or directly adopt deep neural networks by simply inserting an additional fully-connected layer with tanh-like activations. However, the former approach requires time-consuming hand-crafted feature extraction and complicated (discrete) optimizations; the latter lacks the necessary discriminative information greatly due to the straightforward activation functions. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework for efficient ReID inspired by the recent advances in adversarial learning. Specifically, instead of learning explicit projections or adding fully-connected mapping layers, the proposed Adversarial Binary Coding (ABC) framework guides the extraction of binary codes implicitly and effectively. The discriminability of the extracted codes is further enhanced by equipping the ABC with a deep triplet network for the ReID task. More importantly, the ABC and triplet network are simultaneously optimized in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on three large-scale ReID benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art methods.
Click through rate (CTR) prediction of image ads is the core task of online display advertising systems, and logistic regression (LR) has been frequently applied as the prediction model. However, LR model lacks the ability of extracting complex and intrinsic nonlinear features from handcrafted high-dimensional image features, which limits its effectiveness. To solve this issue, in this paper, we introduce a novel deep neural network (DNN) based model that directly predicts the CTR of an image ad based on raw image pixels and other basic features in one step. The DNN model employs convolution layers to automatically extract representative visual features from images, and nonlinear CTR features are then learned from visual features and other contextual features by using fully-connected layers. Empirical evaluations on a real world dataset with over 50 million records demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of this method.