Advancing Myopia To Holism: Fully Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training

In rapidly evolving field of vision-language models (VLMs), contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) has made significant strides, becoming foundation for various downstream tasks. However, relying on one-to-one (image, text) contrastive paradigm to learn alignment from large-scale messy web data, CLIP faces a serious myopic dilemma, resulting in biases towards monotonous short texts and shallow visual expressivity. To overcome these issues, this paper advances CLIP into one novel holistic paradigm, by updating both diverse data and alignment optimization. To obtain colorful data with low cost, we use image-to-text captioning to generate multi-texts for each image, from multiple perspectives, granularities, and hierarchies. Two gadgets are proposed to encourage textual diversity. To match such (image, multi-texts) pairs, we modify the CLIP image encoder into multi-branch, and propose multi-to-multi contrastive optimization for image-text part-to-part matching. As a result, diverse visual embeddings are learned for each image, bringing good interpretability and generalization. Extensive experiments and ablations across over ten benchmarks indicate that our holistic CLIP significantly outperforms existing myopic CLIP, including image-text retrieval, open-vocabulary classification, and dense visual tasks.

Branches, Assemble! Multi-Branch Cooperation Network for Large-Scale Click-Through Rate Prediction at Taobao

Existing click-through rate (CTR) prediction works have studied the role of feature interaction through a variety of techniques. Each interaction technique exhibits its own strength, and solely using one type could constrain the model's capability to capture the complex feature relationships, especially for industrial large-scale data with enormous users and items. Recent research shows that effective CTR models often combine an MLP network with a dedicated feature interaction network in a two-parallel structure. However, the interplay and cooperative dynamics between different streams or branches remain under-researched. In this work, we introduce a novel Multi-Branch Cooperation Network (MBCnet) which enables multiple branch networks to collaborate with each other for better complex feature interaction modeling. Specifically, MBCnet consists of three branches: the Expert-based Feature Grouping and Crossing (EFGC) branch that promotes the model's memorization ability of specific feature fields, the low rank Cross Net branch and Deep branch to enhance both explicit and implicit feature crossing for improved generalization. Among branches, a novel cooperation scheme is proposed based on two principles: branch co-teaching and moderate differentiation. Branch co-teaching encourages well-learned branches to support poorly-learned ones on specific training samples. Moderate differentiation advocates branches to maintain a reasonable level of difference in their feature representations. The cooperation strategy improves learning through mutual knowledge sharing via co-teaching and boosts the discovery of diverse feature interactions across branches. Extensive experiments on large-scale industrial datasets and online A/B test demonstrate MBCnet's superior performance, delivering a 0.09 point increase in CTR, 1.49% growth in deals, and 1.62% rise in GMV. Core codes will be released soon.

DivNet: Diversity-Aware Self-Correcting Sequential Recommendation Networks

As the last stage of a typical \textit{recommendation system}, \textit{collective recommendation} aims to give the final touches to the recommended items and their layout so as to optimize overall objectives such as diversity and whole-page relevance. In practice, however, the interaction dynamics among the recommended items, their visual appearances and meta-data such as specifications are often too complex to be captured by experts' heuristics or simple models. To address this issue, we propose a \textit{\underline{div}ersity-aware self-correcting sequential recommendation \underline{net}works} (\textit{DivNet}) that is able to estimate utility by capturing the complex interactions among sequential items and diversify recommendations simultaneously. Experiments on both offline and online settings demonstrate that \textit{DivNet} can achieve better results compared to baselines with or without collective recommendations.

Pseudo Label Refinery for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on Cross-dataset 3D Object Detection

Recent self-training techniques have shown notable improvements in unsupervised domain adaptation for 3D object detection (3D UDA). These techniques typically select pseudo labels, i.e., 3D boxes, to supervise models for the target domain. However, this selection process inevitably introduces unreliable 3D boxes, in which 3D points cannot be definitively assigned as foreground or background. Previous techniques mitigate this by reweighting these boxes as pseudo labels, but these boxes can still poison the training process. To resolve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel pseudo label refinery framework. Specifically, in the selection process, to improve the reliability of pseudo boxes, we propose a complementary augmentation strategy. This strategy involves either removing all points within an unreliable box or replacing it with a high-confidence box. Moreover, the point numbers of instances in high-beam datasets are considerably higher than those in low-beam datasets, also degrading the quality of pseudo labels during the training process. We alleviate this issue by generating additional proposals and aligning RoI features across different domains. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively enhances the quality of pseudo labels and consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on six autonomous driving benchmarks. Code will be available at https://github.com/Zhanwei-Z/PERE.

Tunnel Try-on: Excavating Spatial-temporal Tunnels for High-quality Virtual Try-on in Videos

Video try-on is a challenging task and has not been well tackled in previous works. The main obstacle lies in preserving the details of the clothing and modeling the coherent motions simultaneously. Faced with those difficulties, we address video try-on by proposing a diffusion-based framework named "Tunnel Try-on." The core idea is excavating a "focus tunnel" in the input video that gives close-up shots around the clothing regions. We zoom in on the region in the tunnel to better preserve the fine details of the clothing. To generate coherent motions, we first leverage the Kalman filter to construct smooth crops in the focus tunnel and inject the position embedding of the tunnel into attention layers to improve the continuity of the generated videos. In addition, we develop an environment encoder to extract the context information outside the tunnels as supplementary cues. Equipped with these techniques, Tunnel Try-on keeps the fine details of the clothing and synthesizes stable and smooth videos. Demonstrating significant advancements, Tunnel Try-on could be regarded as the first attempt toward the commercial-level application of virtual try-on in videos.

Cell Variational Information Bottleneck Network

In this work, we propose Cell Variational Information Bottleneck Network (cellVIB), a convolutional neural network using information bottleneck mechanism, which can be combined with the latest feedforward network architecture in an end-to-end training method. Our Cell Variational Information Bottleneck Network is constructed by stacking VIB cells, which generate feature maps with uncertainty. As layers going deeper, the regularization effect will gradually increase, instead of directly adding excessive regular constraints to the output layer of the model as in Deep VIB. Under each VIB cell, the feedforward process learns an independent mean term and an standard deviation term, and predicts the Gaussian distribution based on them. The feedback process is based on reparameterization trick for effective training. This work performs an extensive analysis on MNIST dataset to verify the effectiveness of each VIB cells, and provides an insightful analysis on how the VIB cells affect mutual information. Experiments conducted on CIFAR-10 also prove that our cellVIB is robust against noisy labels during training and against corrupted images during testing. Then, we validate our method on PACS dataset, whose results show that the VIB cells can significantly improve the generalization performance of the basic model. Finally, in a more complex representation learning task, face recognition, our network structure has also achieved very competitive results.

Wear-Any-Way: Manipulable Virtual Try-on via Sparse Correspondence Alignment

This paper introduces a novel framework for virtual try-on, termed Wear-Any-Way. Different from previous methods, Wear-Any-Way is a customizable solution. Besides generating high-fidelity results, our method supports users to precisely manipulate the wearing style. To achieve this goal, we first construct a strong pipeline for standard virtual try-on, supporting single/multiple garment try-on and model-to-model settings in complicated scenarios. To make it manipulable, we propose sparse correspondence alignment which involves point-based control to guide the generation for specific locations. With this design, Wear-Any-Way gets state-of-the-art performance for the standard setting and provides a novel interaction form for customizing the wearing style. For instance, it supports users to drag the sleeve to make it rolled up, drag the coat to make it open, and utilize clicks to control the style of tuck, etc. Wear-Any-Way enables more liberated and flexible expressions of the attires, holding profound implications in the fashion industry.

Turbo: Informativity-Driven Acceleration Plug-In for Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Large Models (VLMs) have become primary backbone of AI, due to the impressive performance. However, their expensive computation costs, i.e., throughput and delay, impede potentials in real-world scenarios. To achieve acceleration for VLMs, most existing methods focus on the model perspective: pruning, distillation, quantification, but completely overlook the data-perspective redundancy. To fill the overlook, this paper pioneers the severity of data redundancy, and designs one plug-and-play Turbo module guided by information degree to prune inefficient tokens from visual or textual data. In pursuit of efficiency-performance trade-offs, information degree takes two key factors into consideration: mutual redundancy and semantic value. Concretely, the former evaluates the data duplication between sequential tokens; while the latter evaluates each token by its contribution to the overall semantics. As a result, tokens with high information degree carry less redundancy and stronger semantics. For VLMs' calculation, Turbo works as a user-friendly plug-in that sorts data referring to information degree, utilizing only top-level ones to save costs. Its advantages are multifaceted, e.g., being generally compatible to various VLMs across understanding and generation, simple use without retraining and trivial engineering efforts. On multiple public VLMs benchmarks, we conduct extensive experiments to reveal the gratifying acceleration of Turbo, under negligible performance drop.

Enhancing Cross-domain Click-Through Rate Prediction via Explicit Feature Augmentation

Cross-domain CTR (CDCTR) prediction is an important research topic that studies how to leverage meaningful data from a related domain to help CTR prediction in target domain. Most existing CDCTR works design implicit ways to transfer knowledge across domains such as parameter-sharing that regularizes the model training in target domain. More effectively, recent researchers propose explicit techniques to extract user interest knowledge and transfer this knowledge to target domain. However, the proposed method mainly faces two issues: 1) it usually requires a super domain, i.e. an extremely large source domain, to cover most users or items of target domain, and 2) the extracted user interest knowledge is static no matter what the context is in target domain. These limitations motivate us to develop a more flexible and efficient technique to explicitly transfer knowledge. In this work, we propose a cross-domain augmentation network (CDAnet) being able to perform explicit knowledge transfer between two domains. Specifically, CDAnet contains a designed translation network and an augmentation network which are trained sequentially. The translation network computes latent features from two domains and learns meaningful cross-domain knowledge of each input in target domain by using a designed cross-supervised feature translator. Later the augmentation network employs the explicit cross-domain knowledge as augmented information to boost the target domain CTR prediction. Through extensive experiments on two public benchmarks and one industrial production dataset, we show CDAnet can learn meaningful translated features and largely improve the performance of CTR prediction. CDAnet has been conducted online A/B test in image2product retrieval at Taobao app, bringing an absolute 0.11 point CTR improvement, a relative 0.64% deal growth and a relative 1.26% GMV increase.

Forgedit: Text Guided Image Editing via Learning and Forgetting

Text guided image editing on real images given only the image and the target text prompt as inputs, is a very general and challenging problem, which requires the editing model to reason by itself which part of the image should be edited, to preserve the characteristics of original image, and also to perform complicated non-rigid editing. Previous fine-tuning based solutions are time-consuming and vulnerable to overfitting, limiting their editing capabilities. To tackle these issues, we design a novel text guided image editing method, Forgedit. First, we propose a novel fine-tuning framework which learns to reconstruct the given image in less than one minute by vision language joint learning. Then we introduce vector subtraction and vector projection to explore the proper text embedding for editing. We also find a general property of UNet structures in Diffusion Models and inspired by such a finding, we design forgetting strategies to diminish the fatal overfitting issues and significantly boost the editing abilities of Diffusion Models. Our method, Forgedit, implemented with Stable Diffusion, achieves new state-of-the-art results on the challenging text guided image editing benchmark TEdBench, surpassing the previous SOTA method Imagic with Imagen, in terms of both CLIP score and LPIPS score. Codes are available at https://github.com/witcherofresearch/Forgedit.