TimeCSL: Unsupervised Contrastive Learning of General Shapelets for Explorable Time Series Analysis

Unsupervised (a.k.a. Self-supervised) representation learning (URL) has emerged as a new paradigm for time series analysis, because it has the ability to learn generalizable time series representation beneficial for many downstream tasks without using labels that are usually difficult to obtain. Considering that existing approaches have limitations in the design of the representation encoder and the learning objective, we have proposed Contrastive Shapelet Learning (CSL), the first URL method that learns the general-purpose shapelet-based representation through unsupervised contrastive learning, and shown its superior performance in several analysis tasks, such as time series classification, clustering, and anomaly detection. In this paper, we develop TimeCSL, an end-to-end system that makes full use of the general and interpretable shapelets learned by CSL to achieve explorable time series analysis in a unified pipeline. We introduce the system components and demonstrate how users interact with TimeCSL to solve different analysis tasks in the unified pipeline, and gain insight into their time series by exploring the learned shapelets and representation.

Dr.Hair: Reconstructing Scalp-Connected Hair Strands without Pre-training via Differentiable Rendering of Line Segments

In the film and gaming industries, achieving a realistic hair appearance typically involves the use of strands originating from the scalp. However, reconstructing these strands from observed surface images of hair presents significant challenges. The difficulty in acquiring Ground Truth (GT) data has led state-of-the-art learning-based methods to rely on pre-training with manually prepared synthetic CG data. This process is not only labor-intensive and costly but also introduces complications due to the domain gap when compared to real-world data. In this study, we propose an optimization-based approach that eliminates the need for pre-training. Our method represents hair strands as line segments growing from the scalp and optimizes them using a novel differentiable rendering algorithm. To robustly optimize a substantial number of slender explicit geometries, we introduce 3D orientation estimation utilizing global optimization, strand initialization based on Laplace's equation, and reparameterization that leverages geometric connectivity and spatial proximity. Unlike existing optimization-based methods, our method is capable of reconstructing internal hair flow in an absolute direction. Our method exhibits robust and accurate inverse rendering, surpassing the quality of existing methods and significantly improving processing speed.

MetaSplit: Meta-Split Network for Limited-Stock Product Recommendation

Compared to business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce systems, consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce platforms usually encounter the limited-stock problem, that is, a product can only be sold one time in a C2C system. This poses several unique challenges for click-through rate (CTR) prediction. Due to limited user interactions for each product (i.e. item), the corresponding item embedding in the CTR model may not easily converge. This makes the conventional sequence modeling based approaches cannot effectively utilize user history information since historical user behaviors contain a mixture of items with different volume of stocks. Particularly, the attention mechanism in a sequence model tends to assign higher score to products with more accumulated user interactions, making limited-stock products being ignored and contribute less to the final output. To this end, we propose the Meta-Split Network (MSNet) to split user history sequence regarding to the volume of stock for each product, and adopt differentiated modeling approaches for different sequences. As for the limited-stock products, a meta-learning approach is applied to address the problem of inconvergence, which is achieved by designing meta scaling and shifting networks with ID and side information. In addition, traditional approach can hardly update item embedding once the product is consumed. Thereby, we propose an auxiliary loss that makes the parameters updatable even when the product is no longer in distribution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution addressing the recommendation of limited-stock product. Experimental results on the production dataset and online A/B testing demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Making Pre-trained Language Models Great on Tabular Prediction

The transferability of deep neural networks (DNNs) has made significant progress in image and language processing. However, due to the heterogeneity among tables, such DNN bonus is still far from being well exploited on tabular data prediction (e.g., regression or classification tasks). Condensing knowledge from diverse domains, language models (LMs) possess the capability to comprehend feature names from various tables, potentially serving as versatile learners in transferring knowledge across distinct tables and diverse prediction tasks, but their discrete text representation space is inherently incompatible with numerical feature values in tables. In this paper, we present TP-BERTa, a specifically pre-trained LM for tabular data prediction. Concretely, a novel relative magnitude tokenization converts scalar numerical feature values to finely discrete, high-dimensional tokens, and an intra-feature attention approach integrates feature values with the corresponding feature names. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our pre-trained TP-BERTa leads the performance among tabular DNNs and is competitive with Gradient Boosted Decision Tree models in typical tabular data regime.

Tuning-Free Noise Rectification for High Fidelity Image-to-Video Generation

Image-to-video (I2V) generation tasks always suffer from keeping high fidelity in the open domains. Traditional image animation techniques primarily focus on specific domains such as faces or human poses, making them difficult to generalize to open domains. Several recent I2V frameworks based on diffusion models can generate dynamic content for open domain images but fail to maintain fidelity. We found that two main factors of low fidelity are the loss of image details and the noise prediction biases during the denoising process. To this end, we propose an effective method that can be applied to mainstream video diffusion models. This method achieves high fidelity based on supplementing more precise image information and noise rectification. Specifically, given a specified image, our method first adds noise to the input image latent to keep more details, then denoises the noisy latent with proper rectification to alleviate the noise prediction biases. Our method is tuning-free and plug-and-play. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving the fidelity of generated videos. For more image-to-video generated results, please refer to the project website: https://noise-rectification.github.io.

AtomoVideo: High Fidelity Image-to-Video Generation

Recently, video generation has achieved significant rapid development based on superior text-to-image generation techniques. In this work, we propose a high fidelity framework for image-to-video generation, named AtomoVideo. Based on multi-granularity image injection, we achieve higher fidelity of the generated video to the given image. In addition, thanks to high quality datasets and training strategies, we achieve greater motion intensity while maintaining superior temporal consistency and stability. Our architecture extends flexibly to the video frame prediction task, enabling long sequence prediction through iterative generation. Furthermore, due to the design of adapter training, our approach can be well combined with existing personalized models and controllable modules. By quantitatively and qualitatively evaluation, AtomoVideo achieves superior results compared to popular methods, more examples can be found on our project website: https://atomo-video.github.io/.

MEBS: Multi-task End-to-end Bid Shading for Multi-slot Display Advertising

Online bidding and auction are crucial aspects of the online advertising industry. Conventionally, there is only one slot for ad display and most current studies focus on it. Nowadays, multi-slot display advertising is gradually becoming popular where many ads could be displayed in a list and shown as a whole to users. However, multi-slot display advertising leads to different cost-effectiveness. Advertisers have the incentive to adjust bid prices so as to win the most economical ad positions. In this study, we introduce bid shading into multi-slot display advertising for bid price adjustment with a Multi-task End-to-end Bid Shading(MEBS) method. We prove the optimality of our method theoretically and examine its performance experimentally. Through extensive offline and online experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method, and we obtain a 7.01% lift in Gross Merchandise Volume, a 7.42% lift in Return on Investment, and a 3.26% lift in ad buy count.

SERVAL: Synergy Learning between Vertical Models and LLMs towards Oracle-Level Zero-shot Medical Prediction

Recent development of large language models (LLMs) has exhibited impressive zero-shot proficiency on generic and common sense questions. However, LLMs' application on domain-specific vertical questions still lags behind, primarily due to the humiliation problems and deficiencies in vertical knowledge. Furthermore, the vertical data annotation process often requires labor-intensive expert involvement, thereby presenting an additional challenge in enhancing the model's vertical capabilities. In this paper, we propose SERVAL, a synergy learning pipeline designed for unsupervised development of vertical capabilities in both LLMs and small models by mutual enhancement. Specifically, SERVAL utilizes the LLM's zero-shot outputs as annotations, leveraging its confidence to teach a robust vertical model from scratch. Reversely, the trained vertical model guides the LLM fine-tuning to enhance its zero-shot capability, progressively improving both models through an iterative process. In medical domain, known for complex vertical knowledge and costly annotations, comprehensive experiments show that, without access to any gold labels, SERVAL with the synergy learning of OpenAI GPT-3.5 and a simple model attains fully-supervised competitive performance across ten widely used medical datasets. These datasets represent vertically specialized medical diagnostic scenarios (e.g., diabetes, heart diseases, COVID-19), highlighting the potential of SERVAL in refining the vertical capabilities of LLMs and training vertical models from scratch, all achieved without the need for annotations.