Studio2Shop: from studio photo shoots to fashion articles

Fashion is an increasingly important topic in computer vision, in particular the so-called street-to-shop task of matching street images with shop images containing similar fashion items. Solving this problem promises new means of making fashion searchable and helping shoppers find the articles they are looking for. This paper focuses on finding pieces of clothing worn by a person in full-body or half-body images with neutral backgrounds. Such images are ubiquitous on the web and in fashion blogs, and are typically studio photos, we refer to this setting as studio-to-shop. Recent advances in computational fashion include the development of domain-specific numerical representations. Our model Studio2Shop builds on top of such representations and uses a deep convolutional network trained to match a query image to the numerical feature vectors of all the articles annotated in this image. Top-$k$ retrieval evaluation on test query images shows that the correct items are most often found within a range that is sufficiently small for building realistic visual search engines for the studio-to-shop setting.

Syntax-Aware Language Modeling with Recurrent Neural Networks

Neural language models (LMs) are typically trained using only lexical features, such as surface forms of words. In this paper, we argue this deprives the LM of crucial syntactic signals that can be detected at high confidence using existing parsers. We present a simple but highly effective approach for training neural LMs using both lexical and syntactic information, and a novel approach for applying such LMs to unparsed text using sequential Monte Carlo sampling. In experiments on a range of corpora and corpus sizes, we show our approach consistently outperforms standard lexical LMs in character-level language modeling; on the other hand, for word-level models the models are on a par with standard language models. These results indicate potential for expanding LMs beyond lexical surface features to higher-level NLP features for character-level models.

Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms

We present Fashion-MNIST, a new dataset comprising of 28x28 grayscale images of 70,000 fashion products from 10 categories, with 7,000 images per category. The training set has 60,000 images and the test set has 10,000 images. Fashion-MNIST is intended to serve as a direct drop-in replacement for the original MNIST dataset for benchmarking machine learning algorithms, as it shares the same image size, data format and the structure of training and testing splits. The dataset is freely available at https://github.com/zalandoresearch/fashion-mnist

Learning Texture Manifolds with the Periodic Spatial GAN

This paper introduces a novel approach to texture synthesis based on generative adversarial networks (GAN) (Goodfellow et al., 2014). We extend the structure of the input noise distribution by constructing tensors with different types of dimensions. We call this technique Periodic Spatial GAN (PSGAN). The PSGAN has several novel abilities which surpass the current state of the art in texture synthesis. First, we can learn multiple textures from datasets of one or more complex large images. Second, we show that the image generation with PSGANs has properties of a texture manifold: we can smoothly interpolate between samples in the structured noise space and generate novel samples, which lie perceptually between the textures of the original dataset. In addition, we can also accurately learn periodical textures. We make multiple experiments which show that PSGANs can flexibly handle diverse texture and image data sources. Our method is highly scalable and it can generate output images of arbitrary large size.

Texture Synthesis with Spatial Generative Adversarial Networks

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a recent approach to train generative models of data, which have been shown to work particularly well on image data. In the current paper we introduce a new model for texture synthesis based on GAN learning. By extending the input noise distribution space from a single vector to a whole spatial tensor, we create an architecture with properties well suited to the task of texture synthesis, which we call spatial GAN (SGAN). To our knowledge, this is the first successful completely data-driven texture synthesis method based on GANs. Our method has the following features which make it a state of the art algorithm for texture synthesis: high image quality of the generated textures, very high scalability w.r.t. the output texture size, fast real-time forward generation, the ability to fuse multiple diverse source images in complex textures. To illustrate these capabilities we present multiple experiments with different classes of texture images and use cases. We also discuss some limitations of our method with respect to the types of texture images it can synthesize, and compare it to other neural techniques for texture generation.

An LSTM-Based Dynamic Customer Model for Fashion Recommendation

Online fashion sales present a challenging use case for personalized recommendation: Stores offer a huge variety of items in multiple sizes. Small stocks, high return rates, seasonality, and changing trends cause continuous turnover of articles for sale on all time scales. Customers tend to shop rarely, but often buy multiple items at once. We report on backtest experiments with sales data of 100k frequent shoppers at Zalando, Europe's leading online fashion platform. To model changing customer and store environments, our recommendation method employs a pair of neural networks: To overcome the cold start problem, a feedforward network generates article embeddings in "fashion space," which serve as input to a recurrent neural network that predicts a style vector in this space for each client, based on their past purchase sequence. We compare our results with a static collaborative filtering approach, and a popularity ranking baseline.

Fashion DNA: Merging Content and Sales Data for Recommendation and Article Mapping

We present a method to determine Fashion DNA, coordinate vectors locating fashion items in an abstract space. Our approach is based on a deep neural network architecture that ingests curated article information such as tags and images, and is trained to predict sales for a large set of frequent customers. In the process, a dual space of customer style preferences naturally arises. Interpretation of the metric of these spaces is straightforward: The product of Fashion DNA and customer style vectors yields the forecast purchase likelihood for the customer-item pair, while the angle between Fashion DNA vectors is a measure of item similarity. Importantly, our models are able to generate unbiased purchase probabilities for fashion items based solely on article information, even in absence of sales data, thus circumventing the "cold-start problem" of collaborative recommendation approaches. Likewise, it generalizes easily and reliably to customers outside the training set. We experiment with Fashion DNA models based on visual and/or tag item data, evaluate their recommendation power, and discuss the resulting article similarities.