Two-Aspect Information Fusion Model For ABAW4 Multi-task Challenge

In this paper, we propose the solution to the Multi-Task Learning (MTL) Challenge of the 4th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition. The task of ABAW is to predict frame-level emotion descriptors from videos: discrete emotional state; valence and arousal; and action units. Although researchers have proposed several approaches and achieved promising results in ABAW, current works in this task rarely consider interactions between different emotion descriptors. To this end, we propose a novel end to end architecture to achieve full integration of different types of information. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution.

Towards Intrinsic Common Discriminative Features Learning for Face Forgery Detection using Adversarial Learning

Existing face forgery detection methods usually treat face forgery detection as a binary classification problem and adopt deep convolution neural networks to learn discriminative features. The ideal discriminative features should be only related to the real/fake labels of facial images. However, we observe that the features learned by vanilla classification networks are correlated to unnecessary properties, such as forgery methods and facial identities. Such phenomenon would limit forgery detection performance especially for the generalization ability. Motivated by this, we propose a novel method which utilizes adversarial learning to eliminate the negative effect of different forgery methods and facial identities, which helps classification network to learn intrinsic common discriminative features for face forgery detection. To leverage data lacking ground truth label of facial identities, we design a special identity discriminator based on similarity information derived from off-the-shelf face recognition model. With the help of adversarial learning, our face forgery detection model learns to extract common discriminative features through eliminating the effect of forgery methods and facial identities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method under both intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluation settings.

Adversarial Ensemble Training by Jointly Learning Label Dependencies and Member Models

Training an ensemble of different sub-models has empirically proven to be an effective strategy to improve deep neural networks' adversarial robustness. Current ensemble training methods for image recognition usually encode the image labels by one-hot vectors, which neglect dependency relationships between the labels. Here we propose a novel adversarial ensemble training approach to jointly learn the label dependencies and the member models. Our approach adaptively exploits the learned label dependencies to promote the diversity of the member models. We test our approach on widely used datasets MNIST, FasionMNIST, and CIFAR-10. Results show that our approach is more robust against black-box attacks compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/LSD.

Walle: An End-to-End, General-Purpose, and Large-Scale Production System for Device-Cloud Collaborative Machine Learning

To break the bottlenecks of mainstream cloud-based machine learning (ML) paradigm, we adopt device-cloud collaborative ML and build the first end-to-end and general-purpose system, called Walle, as the foundation. Walle consists of a deployment platform, distributing ML tasks to billion-scale devices in time; a data pipeline, efficiently preparing task input; and a compute container, providing a cross-platform and high-performance execution environment, while facilitating daily task iteration. Specifically, the compute container is based on Mobile Neural Network (MNN), a tensor compute engine along with the data processing and model execution libraries, which are exposed through a refined Python thread-level virtual machine (VM) to support diverse ML tasks and concurrent task execution. The core of MNN is the novel mechanisms of operator decomposition and semi-auto search, sharply reducing the workload in manually optimizing hundreds of operators for tens of hardware backends and further quickly identifying the best backend with runtime optimization for a computation graph. The data pipeline introduces an on-device stream processing framework to enable processing user behavior data at source. The deployment platform releases ML tasks with an efficient push-then-pull method and supports multi-granularity deployment policies. We evaluate Walle in practical e-commerce application scenarios to demonstrate its effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability. Extensive micro-benchmarks also highlight the superior performance of MNN and the Python thread-level VM. Walle has been in large-scale production use in Alibaba, while MNN has been open source with a broad impact in the community.

Emergence of Double-slit Interference by Representing Visual Space in Artificial Neural Networks

Artificial neural networks have realized incredible successes at image recognition, but the underlying mechanism of visual space representation remains a huge mystery. Grid cells (2014 Nobel Prize) in the entorhinal cortex support a periodic representation as a metric for coding space. Here, we develop a self-supervised convolutional neural network to perform visual space location, leading to the emergence of single-slit diffraction and double-slit interference patterns of waves. Our discoveries reveal the nature of CNN encoding visual space to a certain extent. CNN is no longer a black box in terms of visual spatial encoding, it is interpretable. Our findings indicate that the periodicity property of waves provides a space metric, suggesting a general role of spatial coordinate frame in artificial neural networks.

VQBB: Image-to-image Translation with Vector Quantized Brownian Bridge

Image-to-image translation is an important and challenging problem in computer vision. Existing approaches like Pixel2Pixel, DualGAN suffer from the instability of GAN and fail to generate diverse outputs because they model the task as a one-to-one mapping. Although diffusion models can generate images with high quality and diversity, current conditional diffusion models still can not maintain high similarity with the condition image on image-to-image translation tasks due to the Gaussian noise added in the reverse process. To address these issues, a novel Vector Quantized Brownian Bridge(VQBB) diffusion model is proposed in this paper. On one hand, Brownian Bridge diffusion process can model the transformation between two domains more accurate and flexible than the existing Markov diffusion methods. As far as the authors know, it is the first work for Brownian Bridge diffusion process proposed for image-to-image translation. On the other hand, the proposed method improved the learning efficiency and translation accuracy by confining the diffusion process in the quantized latent space. Finally, numerical experimental results validated the performance of the proposed method.

Real-time Online Multi-Object Tracking in Compressed Domain

Recent online Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) methods have achieved desirable tracking performance. However, the tracking speed of most existing methods is rather slow. Inspired from the fact that the adjacent frames are highly relevant and redundant, we divide the frames into key and non-key frames respectively and track objects in the compressed domain. For the key frames, the RGB images are restored for detection and data association. To make data association more reliable, an appearance Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) which can be jointly trained with the detector is proposed. For the non-key frames, the objects are directly propagated by a tracking CNN based on the motion information provided in the compressed domain. Compared with the state-of-the-art online MOT methods,our tracker is about 6x faster while maintaining a comparable tracking performance.

Negative Sampling for Recommendation

How to effectively sample high-quality negative instances is important for well training a recommendation model. We argue that a high-quality negative should be both \textit{informativeness} and \textit{unbiasedness}. Although previous studies have proposed some approaches to address the informativeness in negative sampling, few has been done to discriminating false negative from true negative for unbiased negative sampling, not to mention taking both into consideration. This paper first adopts a parameter learning perspective to analyze negative informativeness and unbiasedness in loss gradient-based model training. We argue that both negative sampling and collaborative filtering include an implicit task of negative classification, from which we report an insightful yet beneficial finding about the order relation in predicted negatives' scores. Based on our finding and by regarding negatives as random variables, we next derive the class condition density of true negatives and that of false negatives. We also design a Bayesian classifier for negative classification, from which we define a quantitative unbiasedness measure for negatives. Finally, we propose to use a harmonic mean of informativeness and unbiasedness to sample high-quality negatives. Experimental studies validate the superiority of our negative sampling algorithm over the peers in terms of better sampling quality and better recommendation performance.

i-Razor: A Neural Input Razor for Feature Selection and Dimension Search in Large-Scale Recommender Systems

Input features play a crucial role in the predictive performance of DNN-based industrial recommender systems with thousands of categorical and continuous fields from users, items, contexts, and their interactions. Noisy features and inappropriate embedding dimension assignments can impair the performance of recommender systems and introduce unnecessary complexity in model training and online serving. Optimizing the input configuration of DNN models, including feature selection and embedding dimension assignment, has become one of the essential topics in feature engineering. Typically, feature selection and embedding dimension search are optimized sequentially, i.e., feature selection is performed first, followed by embedding dimension search to determine the optimal dimension size for each selected feature. In contrast, this paper studies the joint optimization of feature selection and embedding dimension search. To this end, we propose a differentiable neural \textbf{i}nput \textbf{razor}, namely \textbf{i-Razor}. Specifically, inspired by recent advances in neural architecture search, we introduce an end-to-end differentiable model to learn the relative importance between different embedding regions of each feature. Furthermore, a flexible pruning algorithm is proposed to simultaneously achieve feature filtering and dimension size derivation. Extensive experiments on two large-scale public datasets in the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) prediction task demonstrate the efficacy and superiority of i-Razor in balancing model complexity and performance.