Alibaba Group

About: Alibaba Group is a company organization based out in Hangzhou, China. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Computer science & Terminal (electronics). The organization has 6810 authors who have published 7389 publications receiving 55653 citations. The organization is also known as: Alibaba Group Holding Limited & Alibaba Group (Cayman Islands).

Learning the Best Pooling Strategy for Visual Semantic Embedding

Abstract: Visual Semantic Embedding (VSE) is a dominant approach for vision-language retrieval, which aims at learning a deep embedding space such that visual data are embedded close to their semantic text labels or descriptions. Recent VSE models use complex methods to better contextualize and aggregate multi-modal features into holistic embeddings. However, we discover that surprisingly simple (but carefully selected) global pooling functions (e.g., max pooling) outperform those complex models, across different feature extractors. Despite its simplicity and effectiveness, seeking the best pooling function for different data modality and feature extractor is costly and tedious, especially when the size of features varies (e.g., text, video). Therefore, we propose a Generalized Pooling Operator (GPO), which learns to automatically adapt itself to the best pooling strategy for different features, requiring no manual tuning while staying effective and efficient. We extend the VSE model using this proposed GPO and denote it as VSE∞.Without bells and whistles, VSE∞ outperforms previous VSE methods significantly on image-text retrieval benchmarks across popular feature extractors. With a simple adaptation, variants of VSE∞ further demonstrate its strength by achieving the new state of the art on two video-text retrieval datasets. Comprehensive experiments and visualizations confirm that GPO always discovers the best pooling strategy and can be a plug-and-play feature aggregation module for standard VSE models. Code and pre-trained models are available at http://jcchen.me/vse_infty/

System and method for processing task resources

Abstract: A device and method for automatically allocating computing resources is disclosed herein. The method includes receiving a task from a client, the task including a plurality of instances and a resource description manifest representing resource needs of the plurality of instances; determining an initial computing resource allocation of a cluster of machines based on the resource description manifest, wherein the initial computing resource allocation is determined based on the resource needs included in the resource description manifest; determining that the resource description manifest indicates a request to utilize an actual computing resource allocation in excess of the initial computing resource allocation; configuring a plurality of actual computing resources to process the plurality of instances, wherein the plurality of actual computing resources are configured to utilize resources in excess of the initial computing resource allocation; and executing the plurality of instances using the plurality of actual computing resources.

Hybrid Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network: Improving Traffic Prediction with Navigation Data

Abstract: Traffic forecasting has recently attracted increasing interest due to the popularity of online navigation services, ridesharing and smart city projects. Owing to the non-stationary nature of road traffic, forecasting accuracy is fundamentally limited by the lack of contextual information. To address this issue, we propose the Hybrid Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (H-STGCN), which is able to "deduce" future travel time by exploiting the data of upcoming traffic volume. Specifically, we propose an algorithm to acquire the upcoming traffic volume from an online navigation engine. Taking advantage of the piecewise-linear flow-density relationship, a novel transformer structure converts the upcoming volume into its equivalent in travel time. We combine this signal with the commonly-utilized travel-time signal, and then apply graph convolution to capture the spatial dependency. Particularly, we construct a compound adjacency matrix which reflects the innate traffic proximity. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The results show that H-STGCN remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various metrics, especially for the prediction of non-recurring congestion.

Bi-Classifier Determinacy Maximization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation challenges the problem of transferring knowledge from a well-labelled source domain to an unlabelled target domain. Recently,adversarial learning with bi-classifier has been proven effective in pushing cross-domain distributions close. Prior approaches typically leverage the disagreement between bi-classifier to learn transferable representations, however, they often neglect the classifier determinacy in the target domain, which could result in a lack of feature discriminability. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method, namely Bi-Classifier Determinacy Maximization(BCDM), to tackle this problem. Motivated by the observation that target samples cannot always be separated distinctly by the decision boundary, here in the proposed BCDM, we design a novel classifier determinacy disparity (CDD) metric, which formulates classifier discrepancy as the class relevance of distinct target predictions and implicitly introduces constraint on the target feature discriminability. To this end, the BCDM can generate discriminative representations by encouraging target predictive outputs to be consistent and determined, meanwhile, preserve the diversity of predictions in an adversarial manner. Furthermore, the properties of CDD as well as the theoretical guarantees of BCDM's generalization bound are both elaborated. Extensive experiments show that BCDM compares favorably against the existing state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods.

Moving Object Detection Revisited: Speed and Robustness

Abstract: The detection of moving objects in videos is very important in many video processing applications, and background modeling is often an indispensable process to achieve this goal. Most of the traditional background modeling methods utilize color or texture information. However, color information is sensitive to illumination variations and texture information cannot be utilized to separate smooth foreground from smooth background in most cases. Achieving good performance in terms of high foreground detection accuracy and low computational cost is also challenging. In this paper, we propose a new integration framework of texture and color information for background modeling, in which the foreground decision equation includes three parts (one part for color information, one part for texture information, and the left part for the integration of color and texture information). This framework is able to combine the advantages of texture and color features while inhibiting their disadvantages as well. Moreover, we propose a block-based method to accelerate the background modeling. In particular, in the texture information modeling process, a single histogram model is established for each block whose bins indicate the occurrence probabilities of different patterns, which is different from the traditional multihistogram model for block-based background modeling, and then dominant background patterns are selected to calculate the background likelihood of new coming blocks. Dynamic background and multimodal problems can be handled through this technique. To evaluate the foreground detection performance reasonably, a new quality measure is proposed. Extensive experiments on various challenging videos validate the effectiveness of the proposed method over state-of-the-art methods.