Edge-Cloud Polarization and Collaboration: A Comprehensive Survey

Influenced by the great success of deep learning via cloud computing and the rapid development of edge chips, research in artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted to both of the computing paradigms, i.e., cloud computing and edge computing. In recent years, we have witnessed significant progress in developing more advanced AI models on cloud servers that surpass traditional deep learning models owing to model innovations (e.g., Transformers, Pretrained families), explosion of training data and soaring computing capabilities. However, edge computing, especially edge and cloud collaborative computing, are still in its infancy to announce their success due to the resource-constrained IoT scenarios with very limited algorithms deployed. In this survey, we conduct a systematic review for both cloud and edge AI. Specifically, we are the first to set up the collaborative learning mechanism for cloud and edge modeling with a thorough review of the architectures that enable such mechanism. We also discuss potentials and practical experiences of some on-going advanced edge AI topics including pretraining models, graph neural networks and reinforcement learning. Finally, we discuss the promising directions and challenges in this field.

Poet: Product-oriented Video Captioner for E-commerce

In e-commerce, a growing number of user-generated videos are used for product promotion. How to generate video descriptions that narrate the user-preferred product characteristics depicted in the video is vital for successful promoting. Traditional video captioning methods, which focus on routinely describing what exists and happens in a video, are not amenable for product-oriented video captioning. To address this problem, we propose a product-oriented video captioner framework, abbreviated as Poet. Poet firstly represents the videos as product-oriented spatial-temporal graphs. Then, based on the aspects of the video-associated product, we perform knowledge-enhanced spatial-temporal inference on those graphs for capturing the dynamic change of fine-grained product-part characteristics. The knowledge leveraging module in Poet differs from the traditional design by performing knowledge filtering and dynamic memory modeling. We show that Poet achieves consistent performance improvement over previous methods concerning generation quality, product aspects capturing, and lexical diversity. Experiments are performed on two product-oriented video captioning datasets, buyer-generated fashion video dataset (BFVD) and fan-generated fashion video dataset (FFVD), collected from Mobile Taobao. We will release the desensitized datasets to promote further investigations on both video captioning and general video analysis problems.

Comprehensive Information Integration Modeling Framework for Video Titling

In e-commerce, consumer-generated videos, which in general deliver consumers' individual preferences for the different aspects of certain products, are massive in volume. To recommend these videos to potential consumers more effectively, diverse and catchy video titles are critical. However, consumer-generated videos seldom accompany appropriate titles. To bridge this gap, we integrate comprehensive sources of information, including the content of consumer-generated videos, the narrative comment sentences supplied by consumers, and the product attributes, in an end-to-end modeling framework. Although automatic video titling is very useful and demanding, it is much less addressed than video captioning. The latter focuses on generating sentences that describe videos as a whole while our task requires the product-aware multi-grained video analysis. To tackle this issue, the proposed method consists of two processes, i.e., granular-level interaction modeling and abstraction-level story-line summarization. Specifically, the granular-level interaction modeling first utilizes temporal-spatial landmark cues, descriptive words, and abstractive attributes to builds three individual graphs and recognizes the intra-actions in each graph through Graph Neural Networks (GNN). Then the global-local aggregation module is proposed to model inter-actions across graphs and aggregate heterogeneous graphs into a holistic graph representation. The abstraction-level story-line summarization further considers both frame-level video features and the holistic graph to utilize the interactions between products and backgrounds, and generate the story-line topic of the video. We collect a large-scale dataset accordingly from real-world data in Taobao, a world-leading e-commerce platform, and will make the desensitized version publicly available to nourish further development of the research community...

Grounded and Controllable Image Completion by Incorporating Lexical Semantics

In this paper, we present an approach, namely Lexical Semantic Image Completion (LSIC), that may have potential applications in art, design, and heritage conservation, among several others. Existing image completion procedure is highly subjective by considering only visual context, which may trigger unpredictable results which are plausible but not faithful to a grounded knowledge. To permit both grounded and controllable completion process, we advocate generating results faithful to both visual and lexical semantic context, i.e., the description of leaving holes or blank regions in the image (e.g., hole description). One major challenge for LSIC comes from modeling and aligning the structure of visual-semantic context and translating across different modalities. We term this process as structure completion, which is realized by multi-grained reasoning blocks in our model. Another challenge relates to the unimodal biases, which occurs when the model generates plausible results without using the textual description. This can be true since the annotated captions for an image are often semantically equivalent in existing datasets, and thus there is only one paired text for a masked image in training. We devise an unsupervised unpaired-creation learning path besides the over-explored paired-reconstruction path, as well as a multi-stage training strategy to mitigate the insufficiency of labeled data. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments as well as ablation studies, which reveal the efficacy of our proposed LSIC.