OTPTO: Joint Product Selection and Inventory Optimization in Fresh E-commerce Front-End Warehouses

In China's competitive fresh e-commerce market, optimizing operational strategies, especially inventory management in front-end warehouses, is key to enhance customer satisfaction and to gain a competitive edge. Front-end warehouses are placed in residential areas to ensure the timely delivery of fresh goods and are usually in small size. This brings the challenge of deciding which goods to stock and in what quantities, taking into account capacity constraints. To address this issue, traditional predict-then-optimize (PTO) methods that predict sales and then decide on inventory often don't align prediction with inventory goals, as well as fail to prioritize consumer satisfaction. This paper proposes a multi-task Optimize-then-Predict-then-Optimize (OTPTO) approach that jointly optimizes product selection and inventory management, aiming to increase consumer satisfaction by maximizing the full order fulfillment rate. Our method employs a 0-1 mixed integer programming model OM1 to determine historically optimal inventory levels, and then uses a product selection model PM1 and the stocking model PM2 for prediction. The combined results are further refined through a post-processing algorithm OM2. Experimental results from JD.com's 7Fresh platform demonstrate the robustness and significant advantages of our OTPTO method. Compared to the PTO approach, our OTPTO method substantially enhances the full order fulfillment rate by 4.34% (a relative increase of 7.05%) and narrows the gap to the optimal full order fulfillment rate by 5.27%. These findings substantiate the efficacy of the OTPTO method in managing inventory at front-end warehouses of fresh e-commerce platforms and provide valuable insights for future research in this domain.

Detection-Friendly Nonuniformity Correction: A Union Framework for Infrared UAVTarget Detection

Infrared unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images captured using thermal detectors are often affected by temperature dependent low-frequency nonuniformity, which significantly reduces the contrast of the images. Detecting UAV targets under nonuniform conditions is crucial in UAV surveillance applications. Existing methods typically treat infrared nonuniformity correction (NUC) as a preprocessing step for detection, which leads to suboptimal performance. Balancing the two tasks while enhancing detection beneficial information remains challenging. In this paper, we present a detection-friendly union framework, termed UniCD, that simultaneously addresses both infrared NUC and UAV target detection tasks in an end-to-end manner. We first model NUC as a small number of parameter estimation problem jointly driven by priors and data to generate detection-conducive images. Then, we incorporate a new auxiliary loss with target mask supervision into the backbone of the infrared UAV target detection network to strengthen target features while suppressing the background. To better balance correction and detection, we introduce a detection-guided self-supervised loss to reduce feature discrepancies between the two tasks, thereby enhancing detection robustness to varying nonuniformity levels. Additionally, we construct a new benchmark composed of 50,000 infrared images in various nonuniformity types, multi-scale UAV targets and rich backgrounds with target annotations, called IRBFD. Extensive experiments on IRBFD demonstrate that our UniCD is a robust union framework for NUC and UAV target detection while achieving real-time processing capabilities. Dataset can be available at https://github.com/IVPLaboratory/UniCD.