arXiv subjects

Hao Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Hao Yang.

At least 397 records · Page 22Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

GroupIM: A Mutual Information Maximization Framework for Neural Group Recommendation

We study the problem of making item recommendations to ephemeral groups, which comprise users with limited or no historical activities together. Existing studies target persistent groups with substantial activity history, while ephemeral groups lack historical interactions. To overcome group interaction sparsity, we propose data-driven regularization strategies to exploit both the preference covariance amongst users who are in the same group, as well as the contextual relevance of users' individual preferences to each group. We make two contributions. First, we present a recommender architecture-agnostic framework GroupIM that can integrate arbitrary neural preference encoders and aggregators for ephemeral group recommendation. Second, we regularize the user-group latent space to overcome group interaction sparsity by: maximizing mutual information between representations of groups and group members; and dynamically prioritizing the preferences of highly informative members through contextual preference weighting. Our experimental results on several real-world datasets indicate significant performance improvements (31-62% relative NDCG@20) over state-of-the-art group recommendation techniques.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Transfer Learning via Contextual Invariants for One-to-Many Cross-Domain Recommendation

The rapid proliferation of new users and items on the social web has aggravated the gray-sheep user/long-tail item challenge in recommender systems. Historically, cross-domain co-clustering methods have successfully leveraged shared users and items across dense and sparse domains to improve inference quality. However, they rely on shared rating data and cannot scale to multiple sparse target domains (i.e., the one-to-many transfer setting). This, combined with the increasing adoption of neural recommender architectures, motivates us to develop scalable neural layer-transfer approaches for cross-domain learning. Our key intuition is to guide neural collaborative filtering with domain-invariant components shared across the dense and sparse domains, improving the user and item representations learned in the sparse domains. We leverage contextual invariances across domains to develop these shared modules, and demonstrate that with user-item interaction context, we can learn-to-learn informative representation spaces even with sparse interaction data. We show the effectiveness and scalability of our approach on two public datasets and a massive transaction dataset from Visa, a global payments technology company (19% Item Recall, 3x faster vs. training separate models for each domain). Our approach is applicable to both implicit and explicit feedback settings.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Fashion Recommendation and Compatibility Prediction Using Relational Network

Fashion is an inherently visual concept and computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) are playing an increasingly important role in shaping the future of this domain. Many research has been done on recommending fashion products based on the learned user preferences. However, in addition to recommending single items, AI can also help users create stylish outfits from items they already have, or purchase additional items that go well with their current wardrobe. Compatibility is the key factor in creating stylish outfits from single items. Previous studies have mostly focused on modeling pair-wise compatibility. There are a few approaches that consider an entire outfit, but these approaches have limitations such as requiring rich semantic information, category labels, and fixed order of items. Thus, they fail to effectively determine compatibility when such information is not available. In this work, we adopt a Relation Network (RN) to develop new compatibility learning models, Fashion RN and FashionRN-VSE, that addresses the limitations of existing approaches. FashionRN learns the compatibility of an entire outfit, with an arbitrary number of items, in an arbitrary order. We evaluated our model using a large dataset of 49,740 outfits that we collected from Polyvore website. Quantitatively, our experimental results demonstrate state of the art performance compared with alternative methods in the literature in both compatibility prediction and fill-in-the-blank test. Qualitatively, we also show that the item embedding learned by FashionRN indicate the compatibility among fashion items.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Face X-ray for More General Face Forgery Detection

In this paper we propose a novel image representation called face X-ray for detecting forgery in face images. The face X-ray of an input face image is a greyscale image that reveals whether the input image can be decomposed into the blending of two images from different sources. It does so by showing the blending boundary for a forged image and the absence of blending for a real image. We observe that most existing face manipulation methods share a common step: blending the altered face into an existing background image. For this reason, face X-ray provides an effective way for detecting forgery generated by most existing face manipulation algorithms. Face X-ray is general in the sense that it only assumes the existence of a blending step and does not rely on any knowledge of the artifacts associated with a specific face manipulation technique. Indeed, the algorithm for computing face X-ray can be trained without fake images generated by any of the state-of-the-art face manipulation methods. Extensive experiments show that face X-ray remains effective when applied to forgery generated by unseen face manipulation techniques, while most existing face forgery detection or deepfake detection algorithms experience a significant performance drop.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Adversarial Light Projection Attacks on Face Recognition Systems: A Feasibility Study

Deep learning-based systems have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks in both digital and physical domains. While feasible, digital attacks have limited applicability in attacking deployed systems, including face recognition systems, where an adversary typically has access to the input and not the transmission channel. In such setting, physical attacks that directly provide a malicious input through the input channel pose a bigger threat. We investigate the feasibility of conducting real-time physical attacks on face recognition systems using adversarial light projections. A setup comprising a commercially available web camera and a projector is used to conduct the attack. The adversary uses a transformation-invariant adversarial pattern generation method to generate a digital adversarial pattern using one or more images of the target available to the adversary. The digital adversarial pattern is then projected onto the adversary's face in the physical domain to either impersonate a target (impersonation) or evade recognition (obfuscation). We conduct preliminary experiments using two open-source and one commercial face recognition system on a pool of 50 subjects. Our experimental results demonstrate the vulnerability of face recognition systems to light projection attacks in both white-box and black-box attack settings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

FCEM: A Novel Fast Correlation Extract Model For Real Time Steganalysis of VoIP Stream via Multi-head Attention

Extracting correlation features between codes-words with high computational efficiency is crucial to steganalysis of Voice over IP (VoIP) streams. In this paper, we utilized attention mechanisms, which have recently attracted enormous interests due to their highly parallelizable computation and flexibility in modeling correlation in sequence, to tackle steganalysis problem of Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) based steganography in compressed VoIP stream. We design a light-weight neural network named Fast Correlation Extract Model (FCEM) only based on a variant of attention called multi-head attention to extract correlation features from VoIP frames. Despite its simple form, FCEM outperforms complicated Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) models on both prediction accuracy and time efficiency. It significantly improves the best result in detecting both low embedded rates and short samples recently. Besides, the proposed model accelerates the detection speed as twice as before when the sample length is as short as 0.1s, making it a excellent method for online services.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2020

Feedback Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition has attracted considerable attention in computer vision since skeleton data is more robust to the dynamic circumstance and complicated background than other modalities. Recently, many researchers have used the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to model spatial-temporal features of skeleton sequences by an end-to-end optimization. However, conventional GCNs are feedforward networks which are impossible for low-level layers to access semantic information in the high-level layers. In this paper, we propose a novel network, named Feedback Graph Convolutional Network (FGCN). This is the first work that introduces the feedback mechanism into GCNs and action recognition. Compared with conventional GCNs, FGCN has the following advantages: (1) a multi-stage temporal sampling strategy is designed to extract spatial-temporal features for action recognition in a coarse-to-fine progressive process; (2) A dense connections based Feedback Graph Convolutional Block (FGCB) is proposed to introduce feedback connections into the GCNs. It transmits the high-level semantic features to the low-level layers and flows temporal information stage by stage to progressively model global spatial-temporal features for action recognition; (3) The FGCN model provides early predictions. In the early stages, the model receives partial information about actions. Naturally, its predictions are relatively coarse. The coarse predictions are treated as the prior to guide the feature learning of later stages for a accurate prediction. Extensive experiments on the datasets, NTU-RGB+D, NTU-RGB+D120 and Northwestern-UCLA, demonstrate that the proposed FGCN is effective for action recognition. It achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the three datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Rethinking the Hyperparameters for Fine-tuning

Fine-tuning from pre-trained ImageNet models has become the de-facto standard for various computer vision tasks. Current practices for fine-tuning typically involve selecting an ad-hoc choice of hyperparameters and keeping them fixed to values normally used for training from scratch. This paper re-examines several common practices of setting hyperparameters for fine-tuning. Our findings are based on extensive empirical evaluation for fine-tuning on various transfer learning benchmarks. (1) While prior works have thoroughly investigated learning rate and batch size, momentum for fine-tuning is a relatively unexplored parameter. We find that the value of momentum also affects fine-tuning performance and connect it with previous theoretical findings. (2) Optimal hyperparameters for fine-tuning, in particular, the effective learning rate, are not only dataset dependent but also sensitive to the similarity between the source domain and target domain. This is in contrast to hyperparameters for training from scratch. (3) Reference-based regularization that keeps models close to the initial model does not necessarily apply for "dissimilar" datasets. Our findings challenge common practices of fine-tuning and encourages deep learning practitioners to rethink the hyperparameters for fine-tuning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Eco-Driving at Signalized Intersections: A Multiple Signal Optimization Approach

Consecutive traffic signalized intersections can increase vehicle stops, producing vehicle accelerations on arterial roads and potentially increasing vehicle fuel consumption levels. Eco-driving systems are one method to improve vehicle energy efficiency with the help of vehicle connectivity. In this paper, an eco-driving system is developed that computes a fuel-optimized vehicle trajectory while traversing more than one signalized intersection. The system is designed in a modular and scalable fashion allowing it to be implemented in large networks without significantly increasing the computational complexity. The proposed system utilizes signal phasing and timing (SPaT) data that are communicated to connected vehicles (CVs) together with real-time vehicle dynamics to compute fuel-optimum trajectories. The proposed algorithm is incorporated in the INTEGRATION microscopic traffic assignment and simulation software to conduct a comprehensive sensitivity analysis of various variables, including: system market penetration rates (MPRs), demand levels, phase splits, offsets and traffic signal spacings on the system performance. The analysis shows that at 100\% MPR, fuel consumption can be reduced by as high as 13.8\%. Moreover, higher MPRs and shorter phase lengths result in larger fuel savings. Optimum demand levels and traffic signal spacings exist that maximize the effectiveness of the algorithm. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that the algorithm works less effective when the traffic signal offset is closer to its optimal value. Finally, the study highlights the need for further work to enhance the algorithm to deal with over-saturated traffic conditions.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2019

X-Net: Brain Stroke Lesion Segmentation Based on Depthwise Separable Convolution and Long-range Dependencies

The morbidity of brain stroke increased rapidly in the past few years. To help specialists in lesion measurements and treatment planning, automatic segmentation methods are critically required for clinical practices. Recently, approaches based on deep learning and methods for contextual information extraction have served in many image segmentation tasks. However, their performances are limited due to the insufficient training of a large number of parameters, which sometimes fail in capturing long-range dependencies. To address these issues, we propose a depthwise separable convolution based X-Net that designs a nonlocal operation namely Feature Similarity Module (FSM) to capture long-range dependencies. The adopted depthwise convolution allows to reduce the network size, while the developed FSM provides a more effective, dense contextual information extraction and thus facilitates better segmentation. The effectiveness of X-Net was evaluated on an open dataset Anatomical Tracings of Lesions After Stroke (ATLAS) with superior performance achieved compared to other six state-of-the-art approaches. We make our code and models available at https://github.com/Andrewsher/X-Net.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2019

NLO QCD Corrections to Inclusive Charmonium and $B_c$ Meson Production in $W^+$ Decays

We calculate the next-to-leading order (NLO) quantum chromodynamics (QCD) corrections to inclusive processes $W^+\to J/ψ(η_c)+c+\bar{s}+X$ and $W^+\to B_c(B_c^{*})+b+\bar{s}+X$ in the framework of nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization formalism. Result indicates that the NLO corrections are significant, and the uncertainties in theoretical predictions with NLO corrections are greatly reduced. The charmonium and $B_c$ meson yielding rates at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are given.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

Fast Steganalysis Method for VoIP Streams

In this letter, we present a novel and extremely fast steganalysis method of Voice over IP (VoIP) streams, driven by the need for a quick and accurate detection of possible steganography in VoIP streams. We firstly analyzed the correlations in carriers. To better exploit the correlation in code-words, we mapped vector quantization code-words into a semantic space. In order to achieve high detection efficiency, only one hidden layer is utilized to extract the correlations between these code-words. Finally, based on the extracted correlation features, we used the softmax classifier to categorize the input stream carriers. To boost the performance of this proposed model, we incorporate a simple knowledge distillation framework into the training process. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance both in detection accuracy and efficiency. In particular, the processing time of this method on average is only about 0.05\% when sample length is as short as 0.1s, attaching strong practical value to online serving of steganography monitor.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2019

Hierarchical Representation Network for Steganalysis of QIM Steganography in Low-Bit-Rate Speech Signals

With the Volume of Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic rises shapely, more and more VoIP-based steganography methods have emerged in recent years, which poses a great threat to the security of cyberspace. Low bit-rate speech codecs are widely used in the VoIP application due to its powerful compression capability. QIM steganography makes it possible to hide secret information in VoIP streams. Previous research mostly focus on capturing the inter-frame correlation or inner-frame correlation features in code-words but ignore the hierarchical structure which exists in speech frame. In this paper, motivated by the complex multi-scale structure, we design a Hierarchical Representation Network to tackle the steganalysis of QIM steganography in low-bit-rate speech signal. In the proposed model, Convolution Neural Network (CNN) is used to model the hierarchical structure in the speech frame, and three level of attention mechanisms are applied at different convolution block, enabling it to attend differentially to more and less important content in speech frame. Experiments demonstrated that the steganalysis performance of the proposed method can outperforms the state-of-the-art methods especially in detecting both short and low embeded speech samples. Moreover, our model needs less computation and has higher time efficiency to be applied to real online services.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2019

motif2vec: Motif Aware Node Representation Learning for Heterogeneous Networks

Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in machine learning on graphs and networks with applications ranging from vehicular network design to IoT traffic management to social network recommendations. Supervised machine learning tasks in networks such as node classification and link prediction require us to perform feature engineering that is known and agreed to be the key to success in applied machine learning. Research efforts dedicated to representation learning, especially representation learning using deep learning, has shown us ways to automatically learn relevant features from vast amounts of potentially noisy, raw data. However, most of the methods are not adequate to handle heterogeneous information networks which pretty much represents most real-world data today. The methods cannot preserve the structure and semantic of multiple types of nodes and links well enough, capture higher-order heterogeneous connectivity patterns, and ensure coverage of nodes for which representations are generated. We propose a novel efficient algorithm, motif2vec that learns node representations or embeddings for heterogeneous networks. Specifically, we leverage higher-order, recurring, and statistically significant network connectivity patterns in the form of motifs to transform the original graph to motif graph(s), conduct biased random walk to efficiently explore higher order neighborhoods, and then employ heterogeneous skip-gram model to generate the embeddings. Unlike previous efforts that uses different graph meta-structures to guide the random walk, we use graph motifs to transform the original network and preserve the heterogeneity. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on multiple real-world networks from diverse domains and against existing state-of-the-art methods on multi-class node classification and link prediction tasks, and demonstrate its consistent superiority over prior work.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

Detecting 11K Classes: Large Scale Object Detection without Fine-Grained Bounding Boxes

Recent advances in deep learning greatly boost the performance of object detection. State-of-the-art methods such as Faster-RCNN, FPN and R-FCN have achieved high accuracy in challenging benchmark datasets. However, these methods require fully annotated object bounding boxes for training, which are incredibly hard to scale up due to the high annotation cost. Weakly-supervised methods, on the other hand, only require image-level labels for training, but the performance is far below their fully-supervised counterparts. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised large scale fine-grained detection method, which only needs bounding box annotations of a smaller number of coarse-grained classes and image-level labels of large scale fine-grained classes, and can detect all classes at nearly fully-supervised accuracy. We achieve this by utilizing the correlations between coarse-grained and fine-grained classes with shared backbone, soft-attention based proposal re-ranking, and a dual-level memory module. Experiment results show that our methods can achieve close accuracy on object detection to state-of-the-art fully-supervised methods on two large scale datasets, ImageNet and OpenImages, with only a small fraction of fully annotated classes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Position Focused Attention Network for Image-Text Matching

Image-text matching tasks have recently attracted a lot of attention in the computer vision field. The key point of this cross-domain problem is how to accurately measure the similarity between the visual and the textual contents, which demands a fine understanding of both modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel position focused attention network (PFAN) to investigate the relation between the visual and the textual views. In this work, we integrate the object position clue to enhance the visual-text joint-embedding learning. We first split the images into blocks, by which we infer the relative position of region in the image. Then, an attention mechanism is proposed to model the relations between the image region and blocks and generate the valuable position feature, which will be further utilized to enhance the region expression and model a more reliable relationship between the visual image and the textual sentence. Experiments on the popular datasets Flickr30K and MS-COCO show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Besides the public datasets, we also conduct experiments on our collected practical large-scale news dataset (Tencent-News) to validate the practical application value of proposed method. As far as we know, this is the first attempt to test the performance on the practical application. Our method achieves the state-of-art performance on all of these three datasets.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

CLCI-Net: Cross-Level fusion and Context Inference Networks for Lesion Segmentation of Chronic Stroke

Segmenting stroke lesions from T1-weighted MR images is of great value for large-scale stroke rehabilitation neuroimaging analyses. Nevertheless, there are great challenges with this task, such as large range of stroke lesion scales and the tissue intensity similarity. The famous encoder-decoder convolutional neural network, which although has made great achievements in medical image segmentation areas, may fail to address these challenges due to the insufficient uses of multi-scale features and context information. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Cross-Level fusion and Context Inference Network (CLCI-Net) for the chronic stroke lesion segmentation from T1-weighted MR images. Specifically, a Cross-Level feature Fusion (CLF) strategy was developed to make full use of different scale features across different levels; Extending Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) with CLF, we have enriched multi-scale features to handle the different lesion sizes; In addition, convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) is employed to infer context information and thus capture fine structures to address the intensity similarity issue. The proposed approach was evaluated on an open-source dataset, the Anatomical Tracings of Lesions After Stroke (ATLAS) with the results showing that our network outperforms five state-of-the-art methods. We make our code and models available at https://github.com/YH0517/CLCI_Net.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2019

Predicting Next-Season Designs on High Fashion Runway

Fashion is a large and fast-changing industry. Foreseeing the upcoming fashion trends is beneficial for fashion designers, consumers, and retailers. However, fashion trends are often perceived as unpredictable due to the enormous amount of factors involved into designers' subjectivity. In this paper, we propose a fashion trend prediction framework and design neural network models to leverage structured fashion runway show data, learn the fashion collection embedding, and further train RNN/LSTM models to capture the designers' style evolution. Our proposed framework consists of (1) a runway embedding learning model that uses fashion runway images to learn every season's collection embedding, and (2) a next-season fashion design prediction model that leverage the concept of designer style and trend to predict next-season design given designers. Through experiments on a collected dataset across 32 years of fashion shows, our framework can achieve the best performance of 78.42% AUC on average and 95% for an individual designer when predicting the next season's design.

cs.CV↗