The Use of Bandit Algorithms in Intelligent Interactive Recommender Systems

In today's business marketplace, many high-tech Internet enterprises constantly explore innovative ways to provide optimal online user experiences for gaining competitive advantages. The great needs of developing intelligent interactive recommendation systems are indicated, which could sequentially suggest users the most proper items by accurately predicting their preferences, while receiving the up-to-date feedback to refine the recommendation results, continuously. Multi-armed bandit algorithms, which have been widely applied into various online systems, are quite capable of delivering such efficient recommendation services. However, few existing bandit models are able to adapt to new changes introduced by the modern recommender systems.

Episode Adaptive Embedding Networks for Few-shot Learning

Few-shot learning aims to learn a classifier using a few labelled instances for each class. Metric-learning approaches for few-shot learning embed instances into a high-dimensional space and conduct classification based on distances among instance embeddings. However, such instance embeddings are usually shared across all episodes and thus lack the discriminative power to generalize classifiers according to episode-specific features. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, namely \emph{Episode Adaptive Embedding Network} (EAEN), to learn episode-specific embeddings of instances. By leveraging the probability distributions of all instances in an episode at each channel-pixel embedding dimension, EAEN can not only alleviate the overfitting issue encountered in few-shot learning tasks, but also capture discriminative features specific to an episode. To empirically verify the effectiveness and robustness of EAEN, we have conducted extensive experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets, under various combinations of different generic embedding backbones and different classifiers. The results show that EAEN significantly improves classification accuracy about $10\%$ to $20\%$ in different settings over the state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-Level Transfer Learning from Near-Field to Far-Field Speaker Verification

In far-field speaker verification, the performance of speaker embeddings is susceptible to degradation when there is a mismatch between the conditions of enrollment and test speech. To solve this problem, we propose the feature-level and instance-level transfer learning in the teacher-student framework to learn a domain-invariant embedding space. For the feature-level knowledge transfer, we develop the contrastive loss to transfer knowledge from teacher model to student model, which can not only decrease the intra-class distance, but also enlarge the inter-class distance. Moreover, we propose the instance-level pairwise distance transfer method to force the student model to preserve pairwise instances distance from the well optimized embedding space of the teacher model. On FFSVC 2020 evaluation set, our EER on Full-eval trials is relatively reduced by 13.9% compared with the fusion system result on Partial-eval trials of Task2. On Task1, compared with the winner's DenseNet result on Partial-eval trials, our minDCF on Full-eval trials is relatively reduced by 6.3%. On Task3, the EER and minDCF of our proposed method on Full-eval trials are very close to the result of the fusion system on Partial-eval trials. Our results also outperform other competitive domain adaptation methods.

Pose2Drone: A Skeleton-Pose-based Framework for Human-Drone Interaction

Drones have become a common tool, which is utilized in many tasks such as aerial photography, surveillance, and delivery. However, operating a drone requires more and more interaction with the user. A natural and safe method for Human-Drone Interaction (HDI) is using gestures. In this paper, we introduce an HDI framework building upon skeleton-based pose estimation. Our framework provides the functionality to control the movement of the drone with simple arm gestures and to follow the user while keeping a safe distance. We also propose a monocular distance estimation method, which is entirely based on image features and does not require any additional depth sensors. To perform comprehensive experiments and quantitative analysis, we create a customized testing dataset. The experiments indicate that our HDI framework can achieve an average of 93.5\% accuracy in the recognition of 11 common gestures. The code is available at: https://github.com/Zrrr1997/Pose2Drone

NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the first NTIRE challenge on quality enhancement of compressed video, with a focus on the proposed methods and results. In this challenge, the new Large-scale Diverse Video (LDV) dataset is employed. The challenge has three tracks. Tracks 1 and 2 aim at enhancing the videos compressed by HEVC at a fixed QP, while Track 3 is designed for enhancing the videos compressed by x265 at a fixed bit-rate. Besides, the quality enhancement of Tracks 1 and 3 targets at improving the fidelity (PSNR), and Track 2 targets at enhancing the perceptual quality. The three tracks totally attract 482 registrations. In the test phase, 12 teams, 8 teams and 11 teams submitted the final results of Tracks 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The proposed methods and solutions gauge the state-of-the-art of video quality enhancement. The homepage of the challenge: https://github.com/RenYang-home/NTIRE21_VEnh

Explore BiLSTM-CRF-Based Models for Open Relation Extraction

Extracting multiple relations from text sentences is still a challenge for current Open Relation Extraction (Open RE) tasks. In this paper, we develop several Open RE models based on the bidirectional LSTM-CRF (BiLSTM-CRF) neural network and different contextualized word embedding methods. We also propose a new tagging scheme to solve overlapping problems and enhance models' performance. From the evaluation results and comparisons between models, we select the best combination of tagging scheme, word embedder, and BiLSTM-CRF network to achieve an Open RE model with a remarkable extracting ability on multiple-relation sentences.

Beyond Low-Pass Filters: Adaptive Feature Propagation on Graphs

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been extensively studied for prediction tasks on graphs. As pointed out by recent studies, most GNNs assume local homophily, i.e., strong similarities in local neighborhoods. This assumption however limits the generalizability power of GNNs. To address this limitation, we propose a flexible GNN model, which is capable of handling any graphs without being restricted by their underlying homophily. At its core, this model adopts a node attention mechanism based on multiple learnable spectral filters; therefore, the aggregation scheme is learned adaptively for each graph in the spectral domain. We evaluated the proposed model on node classification tasks over eight benchmark datasets. The proposed model is shown to generalize well to both homophilic and heterophilic graphs. Further, it outperforms all state-of-the-art baselines on heterophilic graphs and performs comparably with them on homophilic graphs.