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).

Detecting a label from an image

Abstract: Determining a label from an image is disclosed, including: obtaining an image; determining a first portion of the image associated with a special mark; determining a second portion of the image associated with a label based at least in part on the first portion of the image associated with the special mark; and applying character recognition to the second portion of the image associated with the label to determine a value associated with the label.

Value-aware Recommendation based on Reinforcement Profit Maximization

Abstract: Existing recommendation algorithms mostly focus on optimizing traditional recommendation measures, such as the accuracy of rating prediction in terms of RMSE or the quality of top-k recommendation lists in terms of precision, recall, MAP, etc. However, an important expectation for commercial recommendation systems is to improve the final revenue/profit of the system. Traditional recommendation targets such as rating prediction and top-k recommendation are not directly related to this goal. In this work, we blend the fundamental concepts in online advertising and micro-economics into personalized recommendation for profit maximization. Specifically, we propose value-aware recommendation based on reinforcement learning, which directly optimizes the economic value of candidate items to generate the recommendation list. In particular, we generalize the basic concept of click conversion rate (CVR) in computational advertising into the conversation rate of an arbitrary user action (XVR) in E-commerce, where the user actions can be clicking, adding to cart, adding to wishlist, etc. In this way, each type of user action is mapped to its monetized economic value. Economic values of different user actions are further integrated as the reward of a ranking list, and reinforcement learning is used to optimize the recommendation list for the maximum total value. Experimental results in both offline benchmarks and online commercial systems verified the improved performance of our framework, in terms of both traditional top-k ranking tasks and the economic profits of the system.

Transformer-Based Language Model Fine-Tuning Methods for COVID-19 Fake News Detection

Abstract: With the pandemic of COVID-19, relevant fake news is spreading all over the sky throughout the social media. Believing in them without discrimination can cause great trouble to people’s life. However, universal language models may perform weakly in these fake news detection for lack of large-scale annotated data and sufficient semantic understanding of domain-specific knowledge. While the model trained on corresponding corpora is also mediocre for insufficient learning. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based language model fine-tuning approach for these fake news detection. First, the token vocabulary of individual model is expanded for the actual semantics of professional phrases. Second, we adapt the heated-up softmax loss to distinguish the hard-mining samples, which are common for fake news because of the disambiguation of short text. Then, we involve adversarial training to improve the model’s robustness. Last, the predicted features extracted by universal language model RoBERTa and domain-specific model CT-BERT are fused by one multiple layer perception to integrate fine-grained and high-level specific representations. Quantitative experimental results evaluated on existing COVID-19 fake news dataset show its superior performances compared to the state-of-the-art methods among various evaluation metrics. Furthermore, the best weighted average F1 score achieves 99.02%.

A Generalized Nash Equilibrium Approach for Autonomous Energy Management of Residential Energy Hubs

Abstract: The development of the cutting-edge technologies in cogeneration and trigeneration has led to a rapid transition toward integrated energy systems and the mushrooming of energy hubs, calling for effective energy management schemes. This paper proposes a distributed algorithm for autonomous energy management (AEM) of a cluster of residential energy hubs. Given the interactive behaviors of energy purchasing at the supply side, we treat each hub as a self-interested agent, and formulate the AEM problem of these hubs as a monotone generalized Nash game (MON-GNG). On one hand, there are global coupling constraints representing the supply limits of the input energy systems, which are imposed by the limited capacities of electrical feeders and natural gas pipelines, thus making it a GNG. On the other hand, the cost function of each hub is merely convex in its actions considering the input-to-output energy transformation inside and the impacts of the energy storage devices, which leads to an MON game. The existence of the generalized Nash equilibria (GNEs) of this MON-GNG can be theoretically guaranteed. Then, by reformulating the MON-GNG as a variational inequality problem with special decomposition structure, an efficient and single-loop distributed algorithm is then proposed for computing a GNE with clear economic interpretation based on an improved Tikhonov regularization technique. Principles of parameter selection that will guarantee convergence are suggested. Numeric simulations validate the convergence performance and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

MNSIM 2.0: A Behavior-Level Modeling Tool for Memristor-based Neuromorphic Computing Systems

Abstract: Memristor based neuromorphic computing systems give alternative solutions to boost the computing energy efficiency of Neural Network (NN) algorithms. Because of the large-scale applications and the large architecture design space, many factors will affect the computing accuracy and system's performance. In this work, we propose a behavior-level modeling tool for memristor-based neuromorphic computing systems, MNSIM 2.0, to model the performance and help researchers to realize an early-stage design space exploration. Compared with the former version and other benchmarks, MNSIM 2.0 has the following new features: 1. In the algorithm level, MNSIM 2.0 supports the inference accuracy simulation for mixed-precision NNs considering non-ideal factors. 2. In the architecture level, a hierarchical modeling structure for PIM systems is proposed. Users can customize their designs from the aspects of devices, interfaces, processing units, buffer designs, and interconnections. 3. Two hardware-aware algorithm optimization methods are integrated in MNSIM 2.0 to realize software-hardware co-optimization.