Hierarchical Conditional Semi-Paired Image-to-Image Translation For Multi-Task Image Defect Correction On Shopping Websites

On shopping websites, product images of low quality negatively affect customer experience. Although there are plenty of work in detecting images with different defects, few efforts have been dedicated to correct those defects at scale. A major challenge is that there are thousands of product types and each has specific defects, therefore building defect specific models is unscalable. In this paper, we propose a unified Image-to-Image (I2I) translation model to correct multiple defects across different product types. Our model leverages an attention mechanism to hierarchically incorporate high-level defect groups and specific defect types to guide the network to focus on defect-related image regions. Evaluated on eight public datasets, our model reduces the Frechet Inception Distance (FID) by 24.6% in average compared with MoNCE, the state-of-the-art I2I method. Unlike public data, another practical challenge on shopping websites is that some paired images are of low quality. Therefore we design our model to be semi-paired by combining the L1 loss of paired data with the cycle loss of unpaired data. Tested on a shopping website dataset to correct three image defects, our model reduces (FID) by 63.2% in average compared with WS-I2I, the state-of-the art semi-paired I2I method.

KD-FixMatch: Knowledge Distillation Siamese Neural Networks

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has become a crucial approach in deep learning as a way to address the challenge of limited labeled data. The success of deep neural networks heavily relies on the availability of large-scale high-quality labeled data. However, the process of data labeling is time-consuming and unscalable, leading to shortages in labeled data. SSL aims to tackle this problem by leveraging additional unlabeled data in the training process. One of the popular SSL algorithms, FixMatch, trains identical weight-sharing teacher and student networks simultaneously using a siamese neural network (SNN). However, it is prone to performance degradation when the pseudo labels are heavily noisy in the early training stage. We present KD-FixMatch, a novel SSL algorithm that addresses the limitations of FixMatch by incorporating knowledge distillation. The algorithm utilizes a combination of sequential and simultaneous training of SNNs to enhance performance and reduce performance degradation. Firstly, an outer SNN is trained using labeled and unlabeled data. After that, the network of the well-trained outer SNN generates pseudo labels for the unlabeled data, from which a subset of unlabeled data with trusted pseudo labels is then carefully created through high-confidence sampling and deep embedding clustering. Finally, an inner SNN is trained with the labeled data, the unlabeled data, and the subset of unlabeled data with trusted pseudo labels. Experiments on four public data sets demonstrate that KD-FixMatch outperforms FixMatch in all cases. Our results indicate that KD-FixMatch has a better training starting point that leads to improved model performance compared to FixMatch.

CMA-CLIP: Cross-Modality Attention CLIP for Image-Text Classification

Modern Web systems such as social media and e-commerce contain rich contents expressed in images and text. Leveraging information from multi-modalities can improve the performance of machine learning tasks such as classification and recommendation. In this paper, we propose the Cross-Modality Attention Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CMA-CLIP), a new framework which unifies two types of cross-modality attentions, sequence-wise attention and modality-wise attention, to effectively fuse information from image and text pairs. The sequence-wise attention enables the framework to capture the fine-grained relationship between image patches and text tokens, while the modality-wise attention weighs each modality by its relevance to the downstream tasks. In addition, by adding task specific modality-wise attentions and multilayer perceptrons, our proposed framework is capable of performing multi-task classification with multi-modalities. We conduct experiments on a Major Retail Website Product Attribute (MRWPA) dataset and two public datasets, Food101 and Fashion-Gen. The results show that CMA-CLIP outperforms the pre-trained and fine-tuned CLIP by an average of 11.9% in recall at the same level of precision on the MRWPA dataset for multi-task classification. It also surpasses the state-of-the-art method on Fashion-Gen Dataset by 5.5% in accuracy and achieves competitive performance on Food101 Dataset. Through detailed ablation studies, we further demonstrate the effectiveness of both cross-modality attention modules and our method's robustness against noise in image and text inputs, which is a common challenge in practice.

The Blessing and the Curse of the Noise behind Facial Landmark Annotations

The evolving algorithms for 2D facial landmark detection empower people to recognize faces, analyze facial expressions, etc. However, existing methods still encounter problems of unstable facial landmarks when applied to videos. Because previous research shows that the instability of facial landmarks is caused by the inconsistency of labeling quality among the public datasets, we want to have a better understanding of the influence of annotation noise in them. In this paper, we make the following contributions: 1) we propose two metrics that quantitatively measure the stability of detected facial landmarks, 2) we model the annotation noise in an existing public dataset, 3) we investigate the influence of different types of noise in training face alignment neural networks, and propose corresponding solutions. Our results demonstrate improvements in both accuracy and stability of detected facial landmarks.