Zero-Shot Heterogeneous Transfer Learning from Recommender Systems to Cold-Start Search Retrieval

Many recent advances in neural information retrieval models, which predict top-K items given a query, learn directly from a large training set of (query, item) pairs. However, they are often insufficient when there are many previously unseen (query, item) combinations, often referred to as the cold start problem. Furthermore, the search system can be biased towards items that are frequently shown to a query previously, also known as the 'rich get richer' (a.k.a. feedback loop) problem. In light of these problems, we observed that most online content platforms have both a search and a recommender system that, while having heterogeneous input spaces, can be connected through their common output item space and a shared semantic representation. In this paper, we propose a new Zero-Shot Heterogeneous Transfer Learning framework that transfers learned knowledge from the recommender system component to improve the search component of a content platform. First, it learns representations of items and their natural-language features by predicting (item, item) correlation graphs derived from the recommender system as an auxiliary task. Then, the learned representations are transferred to solve the target search retrieval task, performing query-to-item prediction without having seen any (query, item) pairs in training. We conduct online and offline experiments on one of the world's largest search and recommender systems from Google, and present the results and lessons learned. We demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve high performance on offline search retrieval tasks, and more importantly, achieved significant improvements on relevance and user interactions over the highly-optimized production system in online experiments.

Drosophila-Inspired 3D Moving Object Detection Based on Point Clouds

3D moving object detection is one of the most critical tasks in dynamic scene analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel Drosophila-inspired 3D moving object detection method using Lidar sensors. According to the theory of elementary motion detector, we have developed a motion detector based on the shallow visual neural pathway of Drosophila. This detector is sensitive to the movement of objects and can well suppress background noise. Designing neural circuits with different connection modes, the approach searches for motion areas in a coarse-to-fine fashion and extracts point clouds of each motion area to form moving object proposals. An improved 3D object detection network is then used to estimate the point clouds of each proposal and efficiently generates the 3D bounding boxes and the object categories. We evaluate the proposed approach on the widely-used KITTI benchmark, and state-of-the-art performance was obtained by using the proposed approach on the task of motion detection.

Optimization of Graph Total Variation via Active-Set-based Combinatorial Reconditioning

Structured convex optimization on weighted graphs finds numerous applications in machine learning and computer vision. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive preconditioning strategy for proximal algorithms on this problem class. Our preconditioner is driven by a sharp analysis of the local linear convergence rate depending on the "active set" at the current iterate. We show that nested-forest decomposition of the inactive edges yields a guaranteed local linear convergence rate. Further, we propose a practical greedy heuristic which realizes such nested decompositions and show in several numerical experiments that our reconditioning strategy, when applied to proximal gradient or primal-dual hybrid gradient algorithm, achieves competitive performances. Our results suggest that local convergence analysis can serve as a guideline for selecting variable metrics in proximal algorithms.

Modeling Information Need of Users in Search Sessions

Users issue queries to Search Engines, and try to find the desired information in the results produced. They repeat this process if their information need is not met at the first place. It is crucial to identify the important words in a query that depict the actual information need of the user and will determine the course of a search session. To this end, we propose a sequence-to-sequence based neural architecture that leverages the set of past queries issued by users, and results that were explored by them. Firstly, we employ our model for predicting the words in the current query that are important and would be retained in the next query. Additionally, as a downstream application of our model, we evaluate it on the widely popular task of next query suggestion. We show that our intuitive strategy of capturing information need can yield superior performance at these tasks on two large real-world search log datasets.

Informative GANs via Structured Regularization of Optimal Transport

We tackle the challenge of disentangled representation learning in generative adversarial networks (GANs) from the perspective of regularized optimal transport (OT). Specifically, a smoothed OT loss gives rise to an implicit transportation plan between the latent space and the data space. Based on this theoretical observation, we exploit a structured regularization on the transportation plan to encourage a prescribed latent subspace to be informative. This yields the formulation of a novel informative OT-based GAN. By convex duality, we obtain the equivalent view that this leads to perturbed ground costs favoring sparsity in the informative latent dimensions. Practically, we devise a stable training algorithm for the proposed informative GAN. Our experiments support the hypothesis that such regularizations effectively yield the discovery of disentangled and interpretable latent representations. Our work showcases potential power of a regularized OT framework in the context of generative modeling through its access to the transport plan. Further challenges are addressed in this line.

Variational Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo under General Lighting

Photometric stereo (PS) techniques nowadays remain constrained to an ideal laboratory setup where modeling and calibration of lighting is amenable. This work aims to eliminate such restrictions. To this end, we introduce an efficient principled variational approach to uncalibrated PS under general illumination, which is approximated through a second-order spherical harmonic expansion. The joint recovery of shape, reflectance and illumination is formulated as a variational problem where shape estimation is carried out directly in terms of the underlying perspective depth map, thus implicitly ensuring integrability and bypassing the need for a subsequent normal integration. We provide a tailored numerical scheme to solve the resulting nonconvex problem efficiently and robustly. On a variety of evaluations, our method consistently reduces the mean angular error by a factor of 2-3 compared to the state-of-the-art.

Optimization of Inf-Convolution Regularized Nonconvex Composite Problems

In this work, we consider nonconvex composite problems that involve inf-convolution with a Legendre function, which gives rise to an anisotropic generalization of the proximal mapping and Moreau-envelope. In a convex setting such problems can be solved via alternating minimization of a splitting formulation, where the consensus constraint is penalized with a Legendre function. In contrast, for nonconvex models it is in general unclear that this approach yields stationary points to the infimal convolution problem. To this end we analytically investigate local regularity properties of the Moreau-envelope function under prox-regularity, which allows us to establish the equivalence between stationary points of the splitting model and the original inf-convolution model. We apply our theory to characterize stationary points of the penalty objective, which is minimized by the elastic averaging SGD (EASGD) method for distributed training. Numerically, we demonstrate the practical relevance of the proposed approach on the important task of distributed training of deep neural networks.

Probabilistic Discriminative Learning with Layered Graphical Models

Probabilistic graphical models are traditionally known for their successes in generative modeling. In this work, we advocate layered graphical models (LGMs) for probabilistic discriminative learning. To this end, we design LGMs in close analogy to neural networks (NNs), that is, they have deep hierarchical structures and convolutional or local connections between layers. Equipped with tensorized truncated variational inference, our LGMs can be efficiently trained via backpropagation on mainstream deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch. To deal with continuous valued inputs, we use a simple yet effective soft-clamping strategy for efficient inference. Through extensive experiments on image classification over MNIST and FashionMNIST datasets, we demonstrate that LGMs are capable of achieving competitive results comparable to NNs of similar architectures, while preserving transparent probabilistic modeling.

Network Reconstruction and Controlling Based on Structural Regularity Analysis

From the perspective of network analysis, the ubiquitous networks are comprised of regular and irregular components, which makes uncovering the complexity of network structures to be a fundamental challenge. Exploring the regular information and identifying the roles of microscopic elements in network data can help us recognize the principle of network organization and contribute to network data utilization. However, the intrinsic structural properties of networks remain so far inadequately explored and theorised. With the realistic assumption that there are consistent features across the local structures of networks, we propose a low-rank pursuit based self-representation network model, in which the principle of network organization can be uncovered by a representation matrix. According to this model, original true networks can be reconstructed based on the observed unreliable network topology. In particular, the proposed model enables us to estimate the extent to which the networks are regulable, i.e., measuring the reconstructability of networks. In addition, the model is capable of measuring the importance of microscopic network elements, i.e., nodes and links, in terms of network regularity thereby allowing us to regulate the reconstructability of networks based on them. Extensive experiments on disparate real-world networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed network reconstruction and regulation algorithm. Specifically, the network regularity metric can reflect the reconstructability of networks, and the reconstruction accuracy can be improved by removing irregular network links. Lastly, our approach provides an unique and novel insight into the organization exploring of complex networks.