ChatGPT has achieved remarkable success in natural language understanding. Considering that recommendation is indeed a conversation between users and the system with items as words, which has similar underlying pattern with ChatGPT, we design a new chat framework in item index level for the recommendation task. Our novelty mainly contains three parts: model, training and inference. For the model part, we adopt Generative Pre-training Transformer (GPT) as the sequential recommendation model and design a user modular to capture personalized information. For the training part, we adopt the two-stage paradigm of ChatGPT, including pre-training and fine-tuning. In the pre-training stage, we train GPT model by auto-regression. In the fine-tuning stage, we train the model with prompts, which include both the newly-generated results from the model and the user's feedback. For the inference part, we predict several user interests as user representations in an autoregressive manner. For each interest vector, we recall several items with the highest similarity and merge the items recalled by all interest vectors into the final result. We conduct experiments with both offline public datasets and online A/B test to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
With the emergence of pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, how to adapt them to various downstream classification tasks has garnered significant attention in recent research. The adaptation strategies can be typically categorized into three paradigms: zero-shot adaptation, few-shot adaptation, and the recently-proposed training-free few-shot adaptation. Most existing approaches are tailored for a specific setting and can only cater to one or two of these paradigms. In this paper, we introduce a versatile adaptation approach that can effectively work under all three settings. Specifically, we propose the dual memory networks that comprise dynamic and static memory components. The static memory caches training data knowledge, enabling training-free few-shot adaptation, while the dynamic memory preserves historical test features online during the testing process, allowing for the exploration of additional data insights beyond the training set. This novel capability enhances model performance in the few-shot setting and enables model usability in the absence of training data. The two memory networks employ the same flexible memory interactive strategy, which can operate in a training-free mode and can be further enhanced by incorporating learnable projection layers. Our approach is tested across 11 datasets under the three task settings. Remarkably, in the zero-shot scenario, it outperforms existing methods by over 3\% and even shows superior results against methods utilizing external training data. Additionally, our method exhibits robust performance against natural distribution shifts. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/YBZh/DMN}.
Blind video quality assessment (BVQA) plays a pivotal role in evaluating and improving the viewing experience of end-users across a wide range of video-based platforms and services. Contemporary deep learning-based models primarily analyze the video content in its aggressively downsampled format, while being blind to the impact of actual spatial resolution and frame rate on video quality. In this paper, we propose a modular BVQA model, and a method of training it to improve its modularity. Specifically, our model comprises a base quality predictor, a spatial rectifier, and a temporal rectifier, responding to the visual content and distortion, spatial resolution, and frame rate changes on video quality, respectively. During training, spatial and temporal rectifiers are dropped out with some probabilities so as to make the base quality predictor a standalone BVQA model, which should work better with the rectifiers. Extensive experiments on both professionally-generated content and user generated content video databases show that our quality model achieves superior or comparable performance to current methods. Furthermore, the modularity of our model offers a great opportunity to analyze existing video quality databases in terms of their spatial and temporal complexities. Last, our BVQA model is cost-effective to add other quality-relevant video attributes such as dynamic range and color gamut as additional rectifiers.
Rotation estimation of high precision from an RGB-D object observation is a huge challenge in 6D object pose estimation, due to the difficulty of learning in the non-linear space of SO(3). In this paper, we propose a novel rotation estimation network, termed as VI-Net, to make the task easier by decoupling the rotation as the combination of a viewpoint rotation and an in-plane rotation. More specifically, VI-Net bases the feature learning on the sphere with two individual branches for the estimates of two factorized rotations, where a V-Branch is employed to learn the viewpoint rotation via binary classification on the spherical signals, while another I-Branch is used to estimate the in-plane rotation by transforming the signals to view from the zenith direction. To process the spherical signals, a Spherical Feature Pyramid Network is constructed based on a novel design of SPAtial Spherical Convolution (SPA-SConv), which settles the boundary problem of spherical signals via feature padding and realizesviewpoint-equivariant feature extraction by symmetric convolutional operations. We apply the proposed VI-Net to the challenging task of category-level 6D object pose estimation for predicting the poses of unknown objects without available CAD models; experiments on the benchmarking datasets confirm the efficacy of our method, which outperforms the existing ones with a large margin in the regime of high precision.
Point cloud sequences are commonly used to accurately detect 3D objects in applications such as autonomous driving. Current top-performing multi-frame detectors mostly follow a Detect-and-Fuse framework, which extracts features from each frame of the sequence and fuses them to detect the objects in the current frame. However, this inevitably leads to redundant computation since adjacent frames are highly correlated. In this paper, we propose an efficient Motion-guided Sequential Fusion (MSF) method, which exploits the continuity of object motion to mine useful sequential contexts for object detection in the current frame. We first generate 3D proposals on the current frame and propagate them to preceding frames based on the estimated velocities. The points-of-interest are then pooled from the sequence and encoded as proposal features. A novel Bidirectional Feature Aggregation (BiFA) module is further proposed to facilitate the interactions of proposal features across frames. Besides, we optimize the point cloud pooling by a voxel-based sampling technique so that millions of points can be processed in several milliseconds. The proposed MSF method achieves not only better efficiency than other multi-frame detectors but also leading accuracy, with 83.12% and 78.30% mAP on the LEVEL1 and LEVEL2 test sets of Waymo Open Dataset, respectively. Codes can be found at \url{https://github.com/skyhehe123/MSF}.
The representative instance segmentation methods mostly segment different object instances with a mask of the fixed resolution, e.g., 28*28 grid. However, a low-resolution mask loses rich details, while a high-resolution mask incurs quadratic computation overhead. It is a challenging task to predict the optimal binary mask for each instance. In this paper, we propose to dynamically select suitable masks for different object proposals. First, a dual-level Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) with adaptive feature aggregation is developed to gradually increase the mask grid resolution, ensuring high-quality segmentation of objects. Specifically, an efficient region-level top-down path (r-FPN) is introduced to incorporate complementary contextual and detailed information from different stages of image-level FPN (i-FPN). Then, to alleviate the increase of computation and memory costs caused by using large masks, we develop a Mask Switch Module (MSM) with negligible computational cost to select the most suitable mask resolution for each instance, achieving high efficiency while maintaining high segmentation accuracy. Without bells and whistles, the proposed method, namely DynaMask, brings consistent and noticeable performance improvements over other state-of-the-arts at a moderate computation overhead. The source code: https://github.com/lslrh/DynaMask.
Weakly supervised instance segmentation using only bounding box annotations has recently attracted much research attention. Most of the current efforts leverage low-level image features as extra supervision without explicitly exploiting the high-level semantic information of the objects, which will become ineffective when the foreground objects have similar appearances to the background or other objects nearby. We propose a new box-supervised instance segmentation approach by developing a Semantic-aware Instance Mask (SIM) generation paradigm. Instead of heavily relying on local pair-wise affinities among neighboring pixels, we construct a group of category-wise feature centroids as prototypes to identify foreground objects and assign them semantic-level pseudo labels. Considering that the semantic-aware prototypes cannot distinguish different instances of the same semantics, we propose a self-correction mechanism to rectify the falsely activated regions while enhancing the correct ones. Furthermore, to handle the occlusions between objects, we tailor the Copy-Paste operation for the weakly-supervised instance segmentation task to augment challenging training data. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed SIM approach over other state-of-the-art methods. The source code: https://github.com/lslrh/SIM.
It is well-known that the performance of well-trained deep neural networks may degrade significantly when they are applied to data with even slightly shifted distributions. Recent studies have shown that introducing certain perturbation on feature statistics (\eg, mean and standard deviation) during training can enhance the cross-domain generalization ability. Existing methods typically conduct such perturbation by utilizing the feature statistics within a mini-batch, limiting their representation capability. Inspired by the domain generalization objective, we introduce a novel Adversarial Style Augmentation (ASA) method, which explores broader style spaces by generating more effective statistics perturbation via adversarial training. Specifically, we first search for the most sensitive direction and intensity for statistics perturbation by maximizing the task loss. By updating the model against the adversarial statistics perturbation during training, we allow the model to explore the worst-case domain and hence improve its generalization performance. To facilitate the application of ASA, we design a simple yet effective module, namely AdvStyle, which instantiates the ASA method in a plug-and-play manner. We justify the efficacy of AdvStyle on tasks of cross-domain classification and instance retrieval. It achieves higher mean accuracy and lower performance fluctuation. Especially, our method significantly outperforms its competitors on the PACS dataset under the single source generalization setting, \eg, boosting the classification accuracy from 61.2\% to 67.1\% with a ResNet50 backbone. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/YBZh/AdvStyle}.