Write-a-speaker: Text-based Emotional and Rhythmic Talking-head Generation

In this paper, we propose a novel text-based talking-head video generation framework that synthesizes high-fidelity facial expressions and head motions in accordance with contextual sentiments as well as speech rhythm and pauses. To be specific, our framework consists of a speaker-independent stage and a speaker-specific stage. In the speaker-independent stage, we design three parallel networks to generate animation parameters of the mouth, upper face, and head from texts, separately. In the speaker-specific stage, we present a 3D face model guided attention network to synthesize videos tailored for different individuals. It takes the animation parameters as input and exploits an attention mask to manipulate facial expression changes for the input individuals. Furthermore, to better establish authentic correspondences between visual motions (i.e., facial expression changes and head movements) and audios, we leverage a high-accuracy motion capture dataset instead of relying on long videos of specific individuals. After attaining the visual and audio correspondences, we can effectively train our network in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments on qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves high-quality photo-realistic talking-head videos including various facial expressions and head motions according to speech rhythms and outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Easy and Efficient Transformer : Scalable Inference Solution For large NLP mode

The ultra-large-scale pre-training model can effectively improve the effect of a variety of tasks, and it also brings a heavy computational burden to inference. This paper introduces a series of ultra-large-scale pre-training model optimization methods that combine algorithm characteristics and GPU processor hardware characteristics, and on this basis, propose an inference engine -- Easy and Efficient Transformer (EET), Which has a significant performance improvement over the existing schemes. We firstly introduce a pre-padding decoding mechanism that improves token parallelism for generation tasks. Then we design high optimized kernels to remove sequence masks and achieve cost-free calculation for padding tokens, as well as support long sequence and long embedding sizes. Thirdly a user-friendly inference system with an easy service pipeline was introduced which greatly reduces the difficulty of engineering deployment with high throughput. Compared to Faster Transformer's implementation for GPT-2 on A100, EET achieves a 1.5-15x state-of-art speedup varying with context length.EET is available https://github.com/NetEase-FuXi/EET.

Personalized Bundle Recommendation in Online Games

In business domains, \textit{bundling} is one of the most important marketing strategies to conduct product promotions, which is commonly used in online e-commerce and offline retailers. Existing recommender systems mostly focus on recommending individual items that users may be interested in. In this paper, we target at a practical but less explored recommendation problem named bundle recommendation, which aims to offer a combination of items to users. To tackle this specific recommendation problem in the context of the \emph{virtual mall} in online games, we formalize it as a link prediction problem on a user-item-bundle tripartite graph constructed from the historical interactions, and solve it with a neural network model that can learn directly on the graph-structure data. Extensive experiments on three public datasets and one industrial game dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Further, the bundle recommendation model has been deployed in production for more than one year in a popular online game developed by Netease Games, and the launch of the model yields more than 60\% improvement on conversion rate of bundles, and a relative improvement of more than 15\% on gross merchandise volume (GMV).

Reinforcement Learning with a Disentangled Universal Value Function for Item Recommendation

In recent years, there are great interests as well as challenges in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to recommendation systems (RS). In this paper, we summarize three key practical challenges of large-scale RL-based recommender systems: massive state and action spaces, high-variance environment, and the unspecific reward setting in recommendation. All these problems remain largely unexplored in the existing literature and make the application of RL challenging. We develop a model-based reinforcement learning framework, called GoalRec. Inspired by the ideas of world model (model-based), value function estimation (model-free), and goal-based RL, a novel disentangled universal value function designed for item recommendation is proposed. It can generalize to various goals that the recommender may have, and disentangle the stochastic environmental dynamics and high-variance reward signals accordingly. As a part of the value function, free from the sparse and high-variance reward signals, a high-capacity reward-independent world model is trained to simulate complex environmental dynamics under a certain goal. Based on the predicted environmental dynamics, the disentangled universal value function is related to the user's future trajectory instead of a monolithic state and a scalar reward. We demonstrate the superiority of GoalRec over previous approaches in terms of the above three practical challenges in a series of simulations and a real application.

Fever Basketball: A Complex, Flexible, and Asynchronized Sports Game Environment for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

The development of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has benefited from the emergency of a variety type of game environments where new challenging problems are proposed and new algorithms can be tested safely and quickly, such as Board games, RTS, FPS, and MOBA games. However, many existing environments lack complexity and flexibility and assume the actions are synchronously executed in multi-agent settings, which become less valuable. We introduce the Fever Basketball game, a novel reinforcement learning environment where agents are trained to play basketball game. It is a complex and challenging environment that supports multiple characters, multiple positions, and both the single-agent and multi-agent player control modes. In addition, to better simulate real-world basketball games, the execution time of actions differs among players, which makes Fever Basketball a novel asynchronized environment. We evaluate commonly used multi-agent algorithms of both independent learners and joint-action learners in three game scenarios with varying difficulties, and heuristically propose two baseline methods to diminish the extra non-stationarity brought by asynchronism in Fever Basketball Benchmarks. Besides, we propose an integrated curricula training (ICT) framework to better handle Fever Basketball problems, which includes several game-rule based cascading curricula learners and a coordination curricula switcher focusing on enhancing coordination within the team. The results show that the game remains challenging and can be used as a benchmark environment for studies like long-time horizon, sparse rewards, credit assignment, and non-stationarity, etc. in multi-agent settings.

Learning to Utilize Shaping Rewards: A New Approach of Reward Shaping

Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However, since the transformation of human knowledge into numeric reward values is often imperfect due to reasons such as human cognitive bias, completely utilizing the shaping reward function may fail to improve the performance of RL algorithms. In this paper, we consider the problem of adaptively utilizing a given shaping reward function. We formulate the utilization of shaping rewards as a bi-level optimization problem, where the lower level is to optimize policy using the shaping rewards and the upper level is to optimize a parameterized shaping weight function for true reward maximization. We formally derive the gradient of the expected true reward with respect to the shaping weight function parameters and accordingly propose three learning algorithms based on different assumptions. Experiments in sparse-reward cartpole and MuJoCo environments show that our algorithms can fully exploit beneficial shaping rewards, and meanwhile ignore unbeneficial shaping rewards or even transform them into beneficial ones.

Semi-Supervised Learning for In-Game Expert-Level Music-to-Dance Translation

Music-to-dance translation is a brand-new and powerful feature in recent role-playing games. Players can now let their characters dance along with specified music clips and even generate fan-made dance videos. Previous works of this topic consider music-to-dance as a supervised motion generation problem based on time-series data. However, these methods suffer from limited training data pairs and the degradation of movements. This paper provides a new perspective for this task where we re-formulate the translation problem as a piece-wise dance phrase retrieval problem based on the choreography theory. With such a design, players are allowed to further edit the dance movements on top of our generation while other regression based methods ignore such user interactivity. Considering that the dance motion capture is an expensive and time-consuming procedure which requires the assistance of professional dancers, we train our method under a semi-supervised learning framework with a large unlabeled dataset (20x than labeled data) collected. A co-ascent mechanism is introduced to improve the robustness of our network. Using this unlabeled dataset, we also introduce self-supervised pre-training so that the translator can understand the melody, rhythm, and other components of music phrases. We show that the pre-training significantly improves the translation accuracy than that of training from scratch. Experimental results suggest that our method not only generalizes well over various styles of music but also succeeds in expert-level choreography for game players.

Unsupervised Learning Facial Parameter Regressor for Action Unit Intensity Estimation via Differentiable Renderer

Facial action unit (AU) intensity is an index to describe all visually discernible facial movements. Most existing methods learn intensity estimator with limited AU data, while they lack generalization ability out of the dataset. In this paper, we present a framework to predict the facial parameters (including identity parameters and AU parameters) based on a bone-driven face model (BDFM) under different views. The proposed framework consists of a feature extractor, a generator, and a facial parameter regressor. The regressor can fit the physical meaning parameters of the BDFM from a single face image with the help of the generator, which maps the facial parameters to the game-face images as a differentiable renderer. Besides, identity loss, loopback loss, and adversarial loss can improve the regressive results. Quantitative evaluations are performed on two public databases BP4D and DISFA, which demonstrates that the proposed method can achieve comparable or better performance than the state-of-the-art methods. What's more, the qualitative results also demonstrate the validity of our method in the wild.

Neutral Face Game Character Auto-Creation via PokerFace-GAN

Game character customization is one of the core features of many recent Role-Playing Games (RPGs), where players can edit the appearance of their in-game characters with their preferences. This paper studies the problem of automatically creating in-game characters with a single photo. In recent literature on this topic, neural networks are introduced to make game engine differentiable and the self-supervised learning is used to predict facial customization parameters. However, in previous methods, the expression parameters and facial identity parameters are highly coupled with each other, making it difficult to model the intrinsic facial features of the character. Besides, the neural network based renderer used in previous methods is also difficult to be extended to multi-view rendering cases. In this paper, considering the above problems, we propose a novel method named "PokerFace-GAN" for neutral face game character auto-creation. We first build a differentiable character renderer which is more flexible than the previous methods in multi-view rendering cases. We then take advantage of the adversarial training to effectively disentangle the expression parameters from the identity parameters and thus generate player-preferred neutral face (expression-less) characters. Since all components of our method are differentiable, our method can be easily trained under a multi-task self-supervised learning paradigm. Experiment results show that our method can generate vivid neutral face game characters that are highly similar to the input photos. The effectiveness of our method is verified by comparison results and ablation studies.