arXiv subjects

Pan Pan

Publications and source records attributed to Pan Pan.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Train a One-Million-Way Instance Classifier for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning

This paper presents a simple unsupervised visual representation learning method with a pretext task of discriminating all images in a dataset using a parametric, instance-level classifier. The overall framework is a replica of a supervised classification model, where semantic classes (e.g., dog, bird, and ship) are replaced by instance IDs. However, scaling up the classification task from thousands of semantic labels to millions of instance labels brings specific challenges including 1) the large-scale softmax computation; 2) the slow convergence due to the infrequent visiting of instance samples; and 3) the massive number of negative classes that can be noisy. This work presents several novel techniques to handle these difficulties. First, we introduce a hybrid parallel training framework to make large-scale training feasible. Second, we present a raw-feature initialization mechanism for classification weights, which we assume offers a contrastive prior for instance discrimination and can clearly speed up converge in our experiments. Finally, we propose to smooth the labels of a few hardest classes to avoid optimizing over very similar negative pairs. While being conceptually simple, our framework achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches, i.e., SimCLR, MoCoV2, and PIC under ImageNet linear evaluation protocol and on several downstream visual tasks, verifying that full instance classification is a strong pretraining technique for many semantic visual tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Visual Search at Alibaba

This paper introduces the large scale visual search algorithm and system infrastructure at Alibaba. The following challenges are discussed under the E-commercial circumstance at Alibaba (a) how to handle heterogeneous image data and bridge the gap between real-shot images from user query and the online images. (b) how to deal with large scale indexing for massive updating data. (c) how to train deep models for effective feature representation without huge human annotations. (d) how to improve the user engagement by considering the quality of the content. We take advantage of large image collection of Alibaba and state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to perform visual search at scale. We present solutions and implementation details to overcome those problems and also share our learnings from building such a large scale commercial visual search engine. Specifically, model and search-based fusion approach is introduced to effectively predict categories. Also, we propose a deep CNN model for joint detection and feature learning by mining user click behavior. The binary index engine is designed to scale up indexing without compromising recall and precision. Finally, we apply all the stages into an end-to-end system architecture, which can simultaneously achieve highly efficient and scalable performance adapting to real-shot images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advancement of each module in our system. We hope visual search at Alibaba becomes more widely incorporated into today's commercial applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Large Scale Long-tailed Product Recognition System at Alibaba

A practical large scale product recognition system suffers from the phenomenon of long-tailed imbalanced training data under the E-commercial circumstance at Alibaba. Besides product images at Alibaba, plenty of image related side information (e.g. title, tags) reveal rich semantic information about images. Prior works mainly focus on addressing the long tail problem in visual perspective only, but lack of consideration of leveraging the side information. In this paper, we present a novel side information based large scale visual recognition co-training~(SICoT) system to deal with the long tail problem by leveraging the image related side information. In the proposed co-training system, we firstly introduce a bilinear word attention module aiming to construct a semantic embedding over the noisy side information. A visual feature and semantic embedding co-training scheme is then designed to transfer knowledge from classes with abundant training data (head classes) to classes with few training data (tail classes) in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments on four challenging large scale datasets, whose numbers of classes range from one thousand to one million, demonstrate the scalable effectiveness of the proposed SICoT system in alleviating the long tail problem. In the visual search platform Pailitao\footnote{http://www.pailitao.com} at Alibaba, we settle a practical large scale product recognition application driven by the proposed SICoT system, and achieve a significant gain of unique visitor~(UV) conversion rate.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Virtual ID Discovery from E-commerce Media at Alibaba: Exploiting Richness of User Click Behavior for Visual Search Relevance

Visual search plays an essential role for E-commerce. To meet the search demands of users and promote shopping experience at Alibaba, visual search relevance of real-shot images is becoming the bottleneck. Traditional visual search paradigm is usually based upon supervised learning with labeled data. However, large-scale categorical labels are required with expensive human annotations, which limits its applicability and also usually fails in distinguishing the real-shot images. In this paper, we propose to discover Virtual ID from user click behavior to improve visual search relevance at Alibaba. As a totally click-data driven approach, we collect various types of click data for training deep networks without any human annotations at all. In particular, Virtual ID are learned as classification supervision with co-click embedding, which explores image relationship from user co-click behaviors to guide category prediction and feature learning. Concretely, we deploy Virtual ID Category Network by integrating first-clicks and switch-clicks as regularizer. Incorporating triplets and list constraints, Virtual ID Feature Network is trained in a joint classification and ranking manner. Benefiting from exploration of user click data, our networks are more effective to encode richer supervision and better distinguish real-shot images in terms of category and feature. To validate our method for visual search relevance, we conduct an extensive set of offline and online experiments on the collected real-shot images. We consistently achieve better experimental results across all components, compared with alternative and state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Large-Scale Visual Search with Binary Distributed Graph at Alibaba

Graph-based approximate nearest neighbor search has attracted more and more attentions due to its online search advantages. Numbers of methods studying the enhancement of speed and recall have been put forward. However, few of them focus on the efficiency and scale of offline graph-construction. For a deployed visual search system with several billions of online images in total, building a billion-scale offline graph in hours is essential, which is almost unachievable by most existing methods. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm called Binary Distributed Graph to solve this problem. Specifically, we combine binary codes with graph structure to speedup online and offline procedures, and achieve comparable performance with the ones in real-value based scenarios by recalling more binary candidates. Furthermore, the graph-construction is optimized to completely distributed implementation, which significantly accelerates the offline process and gets rid of the limitation of memory and disk within a single machine. Experimental comparisons on Alibaba Commodity Data Set (more than three billion images) show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art with respect to the online/offline trade-off.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Large-Scale Training System for 100-Million Classification at Alibaba

In the last decades, extreme classification has become an essential topic for deep learning. It has achieved great success in many areas, especially in computer vision and natural language processing (NLP). However, it is very challenging to train a deep model with millions of classes due to the memory and computation explosion in the last output layer. In this paper, we propose a large-scale training system to address these challenges. First, we build a hybrid parallel training framework to make the training process feasible. Second, we propose a novel softmax variation named KNN softmax, which reduces both the GPU memory consumption and computation costs and improves the throughput of training. Then, to eliminate the communication overhead, we propose a new overlapping pipeline and a gradient sparsification method. Furthermore, we design a fast continuous convergence strategy to reduce total training iterations by adaptively adjusting learning rate and updating model parameters. With the help of all the proposed methods, we gain 3.9$\times$ throughput of our training system and reduce almost 60\% of training iterations. The experimental results show that using an in-house 256 GPUs cluster, we could train a classifier of 100 million classes on Alibaba Retail Product Dataset in about five days while achieving a comparable accuracy with the naive softmax training process.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Weakly Supervised Learning with Side Information for Noisy Labeled Images

In many real-world datasets, like WebVision, the performance of DNN based classifier is often limited by the noisy labeled data. To tackle this problem, some image related side information, such as captions and tags, often reveal underlying relationships across images. In this paper, we present an efficient weakly supervised learning by using a Side Information Network (SINet), which aims to effectively carry out a large scale classification with severely noisy labels. The proposed SINet consists of a visual prototype module and a noise weighting module. The visual prototype module is designed to generate a compact representation for each category by introducing the side information. The noise weighting module aims to estimate the correctness of each noisy image and produce a confidence score for image ranking during the training procedure. The propsed SINet can largely alleviate the negative impact of noisy image labels, and is beneficial to train a high performance CNN based classifier. Besides, we released a fine-grained product dataset called AliProducts, which contains more than 2.5 million noisy web images crawled from the internet by using queries generated from 50,000 fine-grained semantic classes. Extensive experiments on several popular benchmarks (i.e. Webvision, ImageNet and Clothing-1M) and our proposed AliProducts achieve state-of-the-art performance. The SINet has won the first place in the classification task on WebVision Challenge 2019, and outperformed other competitors by a large margin.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Deep Reinforcement Learning of Volume-guided Progressive View Inpainting for 3D Point Scene Completion from a Single Depth Image

We present a deep reinforcement learning method of progressive view inpainting for 3D point scene completion under volume guidance, achieving high-quality scene reconstruction from only a single depth image with severe occlusion. Our approach is end-to-end, consisting of three modules: 3D scene volume reconstruction, 2D depth map inpainting, and multi-view selection for completion. Given a single depth image, our method first goes through the 3D volume branch to obtain a volumetric scene reconstruction as a guide to the next view inpainting step, which attempts to make up the missing information; the third step involves projecting the volume under the same view of the input, concatenating them to complete the current view depth, and integrating all depth into the point cloud. Since the occluded areas are unavailable, we resort to a deep Q-Network to glance around and pick the next best view for large hole completion progressively until a scene is adequately reconstructed while guaranteeing validity. All steps are learned jointly to achieve robust and consistent results. We perform qualitative and quantitative evaluations with extensive experiments on the SUNCG data, obtaining better results than the state of the art.

cs.CV↗