Makeup216: Logo Recognition with Adversarial Attention Representations

One of the challenges of logo recognition lies in the diversity of forms, such as symbols, texts or a combination of both; further, logos tend to be extremely concise in design while similar in appearance, suggesting the difficulty of learning discriminative representations. To investigate the variety and representation of logo, we introduced Makeup216, the largest and most complex logo dataset in the field of makeup, captured from the real world. It comprises of 216 logos and 157 brands, including 10,019 images and 37,018 annotated logo objects. In addition, we found that the marginal background around the pure logo can provide a important context information and proposed an adversarial attention representation framework (AAR) to attend on the logo subject and auxiliary marginal background separately, which can be combined for better representation. Our proposed framework achieved competitive results on Makeup216 and another large-scale open logo dataset, which could provide fresh thinking for logo recognition. The dataset of Makeup216 and the code of the proposed framework will be released soon.

A Novel Sequence Tagging Framework for Consumer Event-Cause Extraction

Consumer Event-Cause Extraction, the task aimed at extracting the potential causes behind certain events in the text, has gained much attention in recent years due to its wide applications. The ICDM 2020 conference sets up an evaluation competition that aims to extract events and the causes of the extracted events with a specified subject (a brand or product). In this task, we mainly focus on how to construct an end-to-end model, and extract multiple event types and event-causes simultaneously. To this end, we introduce a fresh perspective to revisit the relational event-cause extraction task and propose a novel sequence tagging framework, instead of extracting event types and events-causes separately. Experiments show our framework outperforms baseline methods even when its encoder module uses an initialized pre-trained BERT encoder, showing the power of the new tagging framework. In this competition, our team achieved 1st place in the first stage leaderboard, and 3rd place in the final stage leaderboard.

Constraints Penalized Q-Learning for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning

We study the problem of safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to learn a policy that maximizes long-term reward while satisfying safety constraints given only offline data, without further interaction with the environment. This problem is more appealing for real world RL applications, in which data collection is costly or dangerous. Enforcing constraint satisfaction is non-trivial, especially in offline settings, as there is a potential large discrepancy between the policy distribution and the data distribution, causing errors in estimating the value of safety constraints. We show that na\"ive approaches that combine techniques from safe RL and offline RL can only learn sub-optimal solutions. We thus develop a simple yet effective algorithm, Constraints Penalized Q-Learning (CPQ), to solve the problem. Our method admits the use of data generated by mixed behavior policies. We present a theoretical analysis and demonstrate empirically that our approach can learn robustly across a variety of benchmark control tasks, outperforming several baselines.

Model-Based Offline Planning with Trajectory Pruning

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables learning policies using pre-collected datasets without environment interaction, which provides a promising direction to make RL useable in real-world systems. Although recent offline RL studies have achieved much progress, existing methods still face many practical challenges in real-world system control tasks, such as computational restriction during agent training and the requirement of extra control flexibility. Model-based planning framework provides an attractive solution for such tasks. However, most model-based planning algorithms are not designed for offline settings. Simply combining the ingredients of offline RL with existing methods either provides over-restrictive planning or leads to inferior performance. We propose a new light-weighted model-based offline planning framework, namely MOPP, which tackles the dilemma between the restrictions of offline learning and high-performance planning. MOPP encourages more aggressive trajectory rollout guided by the behavior policy learned from data, and prunes out problematic trajectories to avoid potential out-of-distribution samples. Experimental results show that MOPP provides competitive performance compared with existing model-based offline planning and RL approaches, and allows easy adaptation to varying objectives and extra constraints.

DeepThermal: Combustion Optimization for Thermal Power Generating Units Using Offline Reinforcement Learning

Thermal power generation plays a dominant role in the world's electricity supply. It consumes large amounts of coal worldwide, and causes serious air pollution. Optimizing the combustion efficiency of a thermal power generating unit (TPGU) is a highly challenging and critical task in the energy industry. We develop a new data-driven AI system, namely DeepThermal, to optimize the combustion control strategy for TPGUs. At its core, is a new model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) framework, called MORE, which leverages logged historical operational data of a TPGU to solve a highly complex constrained Markov decision process problem via purely offline training. MORE aims at simultaneously improving the long-term reward (increase combustion efficiency and reduce pollutant emission) and controlling operational risks (safety constraints satisfaction). In DeepThermal, we first learn a data-driven combustion process simulator from the offline dataset. The RL agent of MORE is then trained by combining real historical data as well as carefully filtered and processed simulation data through a novel restrictive exploration scheme. DeepThermal has been successfully deployed in four large coal-fired thermal power plants in China. Real-world experiments show that DeepThermal effectively improves the combustion efficiency of a TPGU. We also report and demonstrate the superior performance of MORE by comparing with the state-of-the-art algorithms on the standard offline RL benchmarks. To the best knowledge of the authors, DeepThermal is the first AI application that has been used to solve real-world complex mission-critical control tasks using the offline RL approach.

Face Forgery Detection by 3D Decomposition

Detecting digital face manipulation has attracted extensive attention due to fake media's potential harms to the public. However, recent advances have been able to reduce the forgery signals to a low magnitude. Decomposition, which reversibly decomposes an image into several constituent elements, is a promising way to highlight the hidden forgery details. In this paper, we consider a face image as the production of the intervention of the underlying 3D geometry and the lighting environment, and decompose it in a computer graphics view. Specifically, by disentangling the face image into 3D shape, common texture, identity texture, ambient light, and direct light, we find the devil lies in the direct light and the identity texture. Based on this observation, we propose to utilize facial detail, which is the combination of direct light and identity texture, as the clue to detect the subtle forgery patterns. Besides, we highlight the manipulated region with a supervised attention mechanism and introduce a two-stream structure to exploit both face image and facial detail together as a multi-modality task. Extensive experiments indicate the effectiveness of the extra features extracted from the facial detail, and our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Towards Fast, Accurate and Stable 3D Dense Face Alignment

Existing methods of 3D dense face alignment mainly concentrate on accuracy, thus limiting the scope of their practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel regression framework which makes a balance among speed, accuracy and stability. Firstly, on the basis of a lightweight backbone, we propose a meta-joint optimization strategy to dynamically regress a small set of 3DMM parameters, which greatly enhances speed and accuracy simultaneously. To further improve the stability on videos, we present a virtual synthesis method to transform one still image to a short-video which incorporates in-plane and out-of-plane face moving. On the premise of high accuracy and stability, our model runs at over 50fps on a single CPU core and outperforms other state-of-the-art heavy models simultaneously. Experiments on several challenging datasets validate the efficiency of our method. Pre-trained models and code are available at https://github.com/cleardusk/3DDFA_V2.

Pixel-Face: A Large-Scale, High-Resolution Benchmark for 3D Face Reconstruction

3D face reconstruction is a fundamental task that can facilitate numerous applications such as robust facial analysis and augmented reality. It is also a challenging task due to the lack of high-quality datasets that can fuel current deep learning-based methods. However, existing datasets are limited in quantity, realisticity and diversity. To circumvent these hurdles, we introduce Pixel-Face, a large-scale, high-resolution and diverse 3D face dataset with massive annotations. Specifically, Pixel-Face contains 855 subjects aging from 18 to 80. Each subject has more than 20 samples with various expressions. Each sample is composed of high-resolution multi-view RGB images and 3D meshes with various expressions. Moreover, we collect precise landmarks annotation and 3D registration result for each data. To demonstrate the advantages of Pixel-Face, we re-parameterize the 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) into Pixel-3DM using the collected data. We show that the obtained Pixel-3DM is better in modeling a wide range of face shapes and expressions. We also carefully benchmark existing 3D face reconstruction methods on our dataset. Moreover, Pixel-Face serves as an effective training source. We observe that the performance of current face reconstruction models significantly improves both on existing benchmarks and Pixel-Face after being fine-tuned using our newly collected data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Pixel-3DM and the usefulness of Pixel-Face.

VOC-ReID: Vehicle Re-identification based on Vehicle-Orientation-Camera

Vehicle re-identification is a challenging task due to high intra-class variances and small inter-class variances. In this work, we focus on the failure cases caused by similar background and shape. They pose serve bias on similarity, making it easier to neglect fine-grained information. To reduce the bias, we propose an approach named VOC-ReID, taking the triplet vehicle-orientation-camera as a whole and reforming background/shape similarity as camera/orientation re-identification. At first, we train models for vehicle, orientation and camera re-identification respectively. Then we use orientation and camera similarity as penalty to get final similarity. Besides, we propose a high performance baseline boosted by bag of tricks and weakly supervised data augmentation. Our algorithm achieves the second place in vehicle re-identification at the NVIDIA AI City Challenge 2020.