Chao Chen 0026

dblp:66/3019-26 · DBLP profile ↗
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35ranked-venue papers
9as first author
23since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-4068-6460ORCID · conflict

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 32 · 6 first-author · 21 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 18 · 5 first-author · 11 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 2 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 CoCo-MILP: Inter-Variable Contrastive and Intra-Constraint Competitive MILP Solution Prediction
abstract
Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a cornerstone of combinatorial optimization, yet solving large-scale instances remains a significant computational challenge. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promise in accelerating MILP solvers by predicting high-quality solutions. However, we identify that existing methods misalign with the intrinsic structure of MILP problems at two levels. At the leaning objective level, the Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) loss treats variables independently, neglecting their relative priority and yielding plausible logits. At the model architecture level, standard GNN message passing inherently smooths the representations across variables, msking the natural competitive relationships within constraints. To address these challenges, we propose CoCo-MILP, which explicitly models inter-variable Contrast and intra-constraint Competition for advanced MILP solution prediction. At the objective level, CoCo-MILP introduces the Inter-Variable Contrastive Loss (VCL), which explicitly maximizes the embedding margin between variables assigned one versus zero. At the architectural level, we design an Intra-Constraint Competitive GNN layer that, instead of homogenizing features, learns to differentiate representations of competing variables within a constraint, capturing their exclusionary nature. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate that CoCo-MILP significantly outperforms existing learning-based approaches, reducing the solution gap by up to 68.12% compared to traditional solvers.
Tianle Pu, Yingying Gao, Zijie Geng, Haoyang Liu 0002, Chao Chen 0026, Changjun Fan
AAAI7
2025 Human-centered Interactive Learning via MLLMs for Text-to-Image Person Re-identification
abstract
Despite remarkable advancements in text-to-image person re-identification (TIReID) facilitated by the breakthrough of cross-modal embedding models, existing methods often struggle to distinguish challenging candidate images due to intrinsic limitations, such as network architecture and data quality. To address these issues, we propose an Interactive Cross-modal Learning framework (ICL), which leverages human-centered interaction to enhance the discriminability of text queries through external multimodal knowledge. To achieve this, we propose a plug-and-play Test-time Humane-centered Interaction (THI) module, which performs visual question answering focused on human characteristics, facilitating multi-round interactions with a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to align query intent with latent target images. Specifically, THI refines user queries based on the MLLM responses to reduce the gap to the best-matching images, thereby boosting ranking accuracy. Additionally, to address the limitation of low-quality training texts, we introduce a novel Reorganization Data Augmentation (RDA) strategy based on information enrichment and diversity enhancement to enhance query discriminability by enriching, decomposing, and reorganizing person descriptions. Extensive experiments on four TIReID benchmarks, i.e., CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES RSTPReid, RSTPReid, and UFine6926, demonstrate that our method achieves remarkable performance with substantial improvement. Code is available at https://github.com/QinYang79/ICL.
Chao Chen 0026, Zhihang Fu, Dezhong Peng, Xi Peng 0001, Peng Hu 0002
CVPR2
2025 ROUTE: Robust Multitask Tuning and Collaboration for Text-to-SQL
abstract
Despite the significant advancements in Text-to-SQL (Text2SQL) facilitated by large language models (LLMs), the latest state-of-the-art techniques are still trapped in the in-context learning of closed-source LLMs (e.g., GPT-4), which limits their applicability in open scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a novel RObust mUltitask Tuning and collaboration mEthod (ROUTE) to improve the comprehensive capabilities of open-source LLMs for Text2SQL, thereby providing a more practical solution. Our approach begins with multi-task supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using various synthetic training data related to SQL generation. Unlike existing SFT-based Text2SQL methods, we introduced several additional SFT tasks, including schema linking, noise correction, and continuation writing. Engaging in a variety of SQL generation tasks enhances the model's understanding of SQL syntax and improves its ability to generate high-quality SQL queries. Additionally, inspired by the collaborative modes of LLM agents, we introduce a Multitask Collaboration Prompting (MCP) strategy. This strategy leverages collaboration across several SQL-related tasks to reduce hallucinations during SQL generation, thereby maximizing the potential of enhancing Text2SQL performance through explicit multitask capabilities. Extensive experiments and in-depth analyses have been performed on eight open-source LLMs and five widely-used benchmarks. The results demonstrate that our proposal outperforms the latest Text2SQL methods and yields leading performance.
Chao Chen 0026, Zhihang Fu, Ze Chen 0001, Dezhong Peng, Peng Hu 0002, Jieping Ye
ICLR2
2025 ROPO: Robust Preference Optimization for Large Language Models
abstract
The prevalent noise in the preference data unavoidably poses significant challenges to the preference alignment of large language models (LLMs). Existing efforts for this problem either marginally alleviate the impact of noise without noise reduction, or rely on external LLMs that incur substantial computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose **RO**bust **P**reference **O**ptimization (**ROPO**), an iterative alignment approach that integrates *noise-tolerance* and *noise filtering* without the aid of external models. Specifically, ROPO first formulates the training process with adaptive noise reduction as an optimization problem, which can be efficiently solved in an iterative paradigm. Then, to equip this solving process with noise-tolerance and noise-identification capabilities, we derive a robust loss that suppresses the gradients from samples with high uncertainty. We demonstrate both empirically and theoretically that the derived loss is key to the noise-tolerance and effective filtering of noisy samples. The derived loss further inspires a robustness-guided rejection sampling technique to compensate for the potential important information in discarded queries. Extensive experiments on several widely-used datasets and model architectures demonstrate that ROPO significantly outperforms all baselines under **four** practical noise settings and the random symmetric noise, with its advantage increasing as the noise rate increases.
Xize Liang, Chao Chen 0026, Jie Wang 0005, Zhihang Fu, Hanzhu Chen, Feng Wu 0001, Jieping Ye
ICML2
2025 Controlling Thinking Speed in Reasoning Models
abstract
Human cognition is theorized to operate in two modes: fast, intuitive System 1 thinking and slow, deliberate System 2 thinking. While current Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at System 2 thinking, their inability to perform fast thinking leads to high computational overhead and latency. In this work, we enable LRMs to approximate human intelligence through dynamic thinking speed adjustment, optimizing accuracy-efficiency trade-offs. Our approach addresses two key questions: (1) how to control thinking speed in LRMs, and (2) when to adjust it for optimal performance. For the first question, we identify the steering vector that governs slow-fast thinking transitions in LRMs' representation space. Using this vector, we achieve the first representation editing-based test-time scaling effect, outperforming existing prompt-based scaling methods. For the second question, we apply real-time difficulty estimation to signal reasoning segments of varying complexity. Combining these techniques, we propose the first reasoning strategy that enables fast processing of easy steps and deeper analysis for complex reasoning. Without any training or additional cost, our plug-and-play method yields an average +1.3\% accuracy with -8.6\% token usage across leading LRMs and advanced reasoning benchmarks. All of our algorithms are implemented based on vLLM and are expected to support broader applications and inspire future research.
Zhengkai Lin, Zhihang Fu, Ze Chen 0001, Chao Chen 0026, Liang Xie 0003, Wenxiao Wang 0001, Deng Cai 0001, Jieping Ye
NeurIPS4
2025 RoME: Domain-Robust Mixture-of-Experts for MILP Solution Prediction across Domains
abstract
Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a fundamental and powerful framework for modeling complex optimization problems across diverse domains. Recently, learning-based methods have shown great promise in accelerating MILP solvers by predicting high-quality solutions. However, most existing approaches are developed and evaluated in single-domain settings, limiting their ability to generalize to unseen problem distributions. This limitation poses a major obstacle to building scalable and general-purpose learning-augmented solvers. To address this challenge, we introduce RoME, a domain-Robust Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework for predicting MILP solutions across domains. RoME dynamically routes problem instances to specialized experts based on learned task embeddings. The model is trained using a two-level distributionally robust optimization strategy: inter-domain to mitigate global shifts across domains, and intra-domain to enhance local robustness by introducing perturbations on task embeddings. We reveal that cross-domain training not only enhances the model's generalization capability to unseen domains but also improves performancewithin each individual domain by encouraging the model to capture more general intrinsic combinatorial patterns. Specifically, a single RoME model trained on three domains achieves an average improvement of $67.7\%$ then evaluated on five diverse domains. We further test the pretrained model on MIPLIB in a zero-shot setting, demonstrating its ability to deliver measurable performance gains on challenging real-world instances where existing learning-based approaches often struggle to generalize.
Tianle Pu, Zijie Geng, Haoyang Liu 0002, Jie Wang 0005, Chao Chen 0026, Changjun Fan
NeurIPS7
2025 FSDM: An efficient video super-resolution method based on Frames-Shift Diffusion Model
Chao Chen 0026, Jie Liu 0040, Jie Tang 0006, Gangshan Wu
Neural Networks2
2024 Sketch and Refine: Towards Fast and Accurate Lane Detection
abstract
Lane detection is to determine the precise location and shape of lanes on the road. Despite efforts made by current methods, it remains a challenging task due to the complexity of real-world scenarios. Existing approaches, whether proposal-based or keypoint-based, suffer from depicting lanes effectively and efficiently. Proposal-based methods detect lanes by distinguishing and regressing a collection of proposals in a streamlined top-down way, yet lack sufficient flexibility in lane representation. Keypoint-based methods, on the other hand, construct lanes flexibly from local descriptors, which typically entail complicated post-processing. In this paper, we present a “Sketch-and-Refine” paradigm that utilizes the merits of both keypoint-based and proposal-based methods. The motivation is that local directions of lanes are semantically simple and clear. At the “Sketch” stage, local directions of keypoints can be easily estimated by fast convolutional layers. Then we can build a set of lane proposals accordingly with moderate accuracy. At the “Refine” stage, we further optimize these proposals via a novel Lane Segment Association Module (LSAM), which allows adaptive lane segment adjustment. Last but not least, we propose multi-level feature integration to enrich lane feature representations more efficiently. Based on the proposed “Sketch-and-Refine” paradigm, we propose a fast yet effective lane detector dubbed “SRLane”. Experiments show that our SRLane can run at a fast speed (i.e., 278 FPS) while yielding an F1 score of 78.9%. The source code is available at: https://github.com/passerer/SRLane.
Chao Chen 0026, Jie Liu 0040, Jie Tang 0006, Gangshan Wu
AAAI1
2024 INSIDE: LLMs' Internal States Retain the Power of Hallucination Detection
abstract
Knowledge hallucination have raised widespread concerns for the security and reliability of deployed LLMs. Previous efforts in detecting hallucinations have been employed at logit-level uncertainty estimation or language-level self-consistency evaluation, where the semantic information is inevitably lost during the token-decoding procedure. Thus, we propose to explore the dense semantic information retained within LLMs' \textbf{IN}ternal \textbf{S}tates for halluc\textbf{I}nation \textbf{DE}tection (\textbf{INSIDE}). In particular, a simple yet effective \textbf{EigenScore} metric is proposed to better evaluate responses' self-consistency, which exploits the eigenvalues of responses' covariance matrix to measure the semantic consistency/diversity in the dense embedding space. Furthermore, from the perspective of self-consistent hallucination detection, a test time feature clipping approach is explored to truncate extreme activations in the internal states, which reduces overconfident generations and potentially benefits the detection of overconfident hallucinations. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are performed on several popular LLMs and question-answering (QA) benchmarks, showing the effectiveness of our proposal.
Chao Chen 0026, Kai Liu 0023, Ze Chen 0001, Mingyuan Tao, Zhihang Fu, Jieping Ye
ICLR1
2024 Rethinking Out-of-Distribution Detection on Imbalanced Data Distribution
abstract
Detecting and rejecting unknown out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is critical for deployed neural networks to void unreliable predictions. In real-world scenarios, however, the efficacy of existing OOD detection methods is often impeded by the inherent imbalance of in-distribution (ID) data, which causes significant performance decline. Through statistical observations, we have identified two common challenges faced by different OOD detectors: misidentifying tail class ID samples as OOD, while erroneously predicting OOD samples as head class from ID. To explain this phenomenon, we introduce a generalized statistical framework, termed ImOOD, to formulate the OOD detection problem on imbalanced data distribution. Consequently, the theoretical analysis reveals that there exists a class-aware bias item between balanced and imbalanced OOD detection, which contributes to the performance gap. Building upon this finding, we present a unified training-time regularization technique to mitigate the bias and boost imbalanced OOD detectors across architecture designs. Our theoretically grounded method translates into consistent improvements on the representative CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, and ImageNet-LT benchmarks against several state-of-the-art OOD detection ap- proaches. Code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/imood.
Kai Liu 0023, Zhihang Fu, Sheng Jin 0002, Chao Chen 0026, Ze Chen 0001, Rongxin Jiang 0001, Fan Zhou 0007, Yaowu Chen, Jieping Ye
NeurIPS4
2024 Enhancing LLM's Cognition via Structurization
abstract
When reading long-form text, human cognition is complex and structurized. While large language models (LLMs) process input contexts through a causal and sequential perspective, this approach can potentially limit their ability to handle intricate and complex inputs effectively. To enhance LLM’s cognition capability, this paper presents a novel concept of context structurization. Specifically, we transform the plain, unordered contextual sentences into well-ordered and hierarchically structurized elements. By doing so, LLMs can better grasp intricate and extended contexts through precise attention and information-seeking along the organized structures. Extensive evaluations are conducted across various model architectures and sizes (including a series of auto-regressive LLMs as well as BERT-like masking models) on a diverse set of NLP tasks (e.g., context-based question-answering, exhaustive hallucination evaluation, and passage-level dense retrieval). Empirical results show consistent and significant performance gains afforded by a single-round structurization. In particular, we boost the open-sourced LLaMA2-70B model to achieve comparable performance against GPT-3.5-Turbo as the halluci- nation evaluator. Besides, we show the feasibility of distilling advanced LLMs’ language processing abilities to a smaller yet effective StruXGPT-7B to execute structurization, addressing the practicality of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/struxgpt.
Kai Liu 0023, Zhihang Fu, Chao Chen 0026, Wei Zhang 0090, Rongxin Jiang 0001, Fan Zhou 0007, Yaowu Chen, Jieping Ye
NeurIPS3
2023 From Coarse to Fine: Hierarchical Pixel Integration for Lightweight Image Super-resolution
abstract
Image super-resolution (SR) serves as a fundamental tool for the processing and transmission of multimedia data. Recently, Transformer-based models have achieved competitive performances in image SR. They divide images into fixed-size patches and apply self-attention on these patches to model long-range dependencies among pixels. However, this architecture design is originated for high-level vision tasks, which lacks design guideline from SR knowledge. In this paper, we aim to design a new attention block whose insights are from the interpretation of Local Attribution Map (LAM) for SR networks. Specifically, LAM presents a hierarchical importance map where the most important pixels are located in a fine area of a patch and some less important pixels are spread in a coarse area of the whole image. To access pixels in the coarse area, instead of using a very large patch size, we propose a lightweight Global Pixel Access (GPA) module that applies cross-attention with the most similar patch in an image. In the fine area, we use an Intra-Patch Self-Attention (IPSA) module to model long-range pixel dependencies in a local patch, and then a spatial convolution is applied to process the finest details. In addition, a Cascaded Patch Division (CPD) strategy is proposed to enhance perceptual quality of recovered images. Extensive experiments suggest that our method outperforms state-of-the-art lightweight SR methods by a large margin. Code is available at https://github.com/passerer/HPINet.
Jie Liu 0040, Chao Chen 0026, Jie Tang 0006, Gangshan Wu
AAAI2
2023 FoPro: Few-Shot Guided Robust Webly-Supervised Prototypical Learning
abstract
Recently, webly supervised learning (WSL) has been studied to leverage numerous and accessible data from the Internet. Most existing methods focus on learning noise-robust models from web images while neglecting the performance drop caused by the differences between web domain and real-world domain. However, only by tackling the performance gap above can we fully exploit the practical value of web datasets. To this end, we propose a Few-shot guided Prototypical (FoPro) representation learning method, which only needs a few labeled examples from reality and can significantly improve the performance in the real-world domain. Specifically, we initialize each class center with few-shot real-world data as the ``realistic" prototype. Then, the intra-class distance between web instances and ``realistic" prototypes is narrowed by contrastive learning. Finally, we measure image-prototype distance with a learnable metric. Prototypes are polished by adjacent high-quality web images and involved in removing distant out-of-distribution samples. In experiments, FoPro is trained on web datasets with a few real-world examples guided and evaluated on real-world datasets. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three fine-grained datasets and two large-scale datasets. Compared with existing WSL methods under the same few-shot settings, FoPro still excels in real-world generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/yuleiqin/fopro.
Yulei Qin, Chao Chen 0026, Yunhang Shen, Bo Ren 0002, Yun Gu, Jie Yang 0002, Chunhua Shen
AAAI3
2023 End-to-End Zero-Shot HOI Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation
abstract
Most existing Human-Object Interaction (HOI) Detection methods rely heavily on full annotations with predefined HOI categories, which is limited in diversity and costly to scale further. We aim at advancing zero-shot HOI detection to detect both seen and unseen HOIs simultaneously. The fundamental challenges are to discover potential human-object pairs and identify novel HOI categories. To overcome the above challenges, we propose a novel End-to-end zero-shot HOI Detection (EoID) framework via vision-language knowledge distillation. We first design an Interactive Score module combined with a Two-stage Bipartite Matching algorithm to achieve interaction distinguishment for human-object pairs in an action-agnostic manner. Then we transfer the distribution of action probability from the pretrained vision-language teacher as well as the seen ground truth to the HOI model to attain zero-shot HOI classification. Extensive experiments on HICO-Det dataset demonstrate that our model discovers potential interactive pairs and enables the recognition of unseen HOIs. Finally, our method outperforms the previous SOTA under various zero-shot settings. Moreover, our method is generalizable to large-scale object detection data to further scale up the action sets. The source code is available at: https://github.com/mrwu-mac/EoID.
Mingrui Wu, Jiaxin Gu, Yunhang Shen, Mingbao Lin, Chao Chen 0026, Xiaoshuai Sun
AAAI5
2023 Optimal Parameter and Neuron Pruning for Out-of-Distribution Detection
abstract
For a machine learning model deployed in real world scenarios, the ability of detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is indispensable and challenging. Most existing OOD detection methods focused on exploring advanced training skills or training-free tricks to prevent the model from yielding overconfident confidence score for unknown samples. The training-based methods require expensive training cost and rely on OOD samples which are not always available, while most training-free methods can not efficiently utilize the prior information from the training data. In this work, we propose an \textbf{O}ptimal \textbf{P}arameter and \textbf{N}euron \textbf{P}runing (\textbf{OPNP}) approach, which aims to identify and remove those parameters and neurons that lead to over-fitting. The main method is divided into two steps. In the first step, we evaluate the sensitivity of the model parameters and neurons by averaging gradients over all training samples. In the second step, the parameters and neurons with exceptionally large or close to zero sensitivities are removed for prediction. Our proposal is training-free, compatible with other post-hoc methods, and exploring the information from all training data. Extensive experiments are performed on multiple OOD detection tasks and model architectures, showing that our proposed OPNP consistently outperforms the existing methods by a large margin.
Chao Chen 0026, Zhihang Fu, Kai Liu 0023, Ze Chen 0001, Mingyuan Tao, Jieping Ye
NeurIPS1
2023 Category-Extensible Out-of-Distribution Detection via Hierarchical Context Descriptions
abstract
The key to OOD detection has two aspects: generalized feature representation and precise category description. Recently, vision-language models such as CLIP provide significant advances in both two issues, but constructing precise category descriptions is still in its infancy due to the absence of unseen categories. This work introduces two hierarchical contexts, namely perceptual context and spurious context, to carefully describe the precise category boundary through automatic prompt tuning. Specifically, perceptual contexts perceive the inter-category difference (e.g., cats vs apples) for current classification tasks, while spurious contexts further identify spurious (similar but exactly not) OOD samples for every single category (e.g., cats vs panthers, apples vs peaches). The two contexts hierarchically construct the precise description for a certain category, which is, first roughly classifying a sample to the predicted category and then delicately identifying whether it is truly an ID sample or actually OOD. Moreover, the precise descriptions for those categories within the vision-language framework present a novel application: CATegory-EXtensible OOD detection (CATEX). One can efficiently extend the set of recognizable categories by simply merging the hierarchical contexts learned under different sub-task settings. And extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate CATEX’s effectiveness, robustness, and category-extensibility. For instance, CATEX consistently surpasses the rivals by a large margin with several protocols on the challenging ImageNet-1K dataset. In addition, we offer new insights on how to efficiently scale up the prompt engineering in vision-language models to recognize thousands of object categories, as well as how to incorporate large language models (like GPT-3) to boost zero-shot applications.
Kai Liu 0023, Zhihang Fu, Chao Chen 0026, Sheng Jin 0002, Ze Chen 0001, Mingyuan Tao, Rongxin Jiang 0001, Jieping Ye
NeurIPS3
2022 DIFNet: Boosting Visual Information Flow for Image Captioning
abstract
Current Image Captioning (IC) methods predict textual words sequentially based on the input visual information from the visual feature extractor and the partially generated sentence information. However, for most cases, the partially generated sentence may dominate the target word prediction due to the insufficiency of visual information, making the generated descriptions irrelevant to the content of the given image. In this paper, we propose a Dual Information Flow Network (DIFNet11Source code is available at: https://github.com/mrwu-mac/DIFNet) to address this issue, which takes segmentation feature as another visual information source to enhance the contribution of visual information for prediction. To maximize the use of two information flows, we also propose an effective feature fusion module termed Iterative Independent Layer Normalization (IILN) which can condense the most relevant inputs while retraining modality-specific information in each flow. Experiments show that our method is able to enhance the dependence of prediction on visual information, making word prediction more focused on the visual content, and thus achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the MSCOCO dataset, e.g., 136.2 CIDEr on COCO Karpathy test split.
Mingrui Wu, Xuying Zhang, Xiaoshuai Sun, Yiyi Zhou, Chao Chen 0026, Jiaxin Gu, Xing Sun 0001, Rongrong Ji
CVPR5
2022 PixelFolder: An Efficient Progressive Pixel Synthesis Network for Image Generation
Yiyi Zhou, Qi Zhang 0066, Jun Peng 0007, Yunhang Shen, Xiaoshuai Sun, Chao Chen 0026, Rongrong Ji
ECCV (14)7
2022 ECO-TR: Efficient Correspondences Finding via Coarse-to-Fine Refinement
Dongli Tan, Jiang-Jiang Liu 0001, Chao Chen 0026, Yunhang Shen, Shouhong Ding, Rongrong Ji
ECCV (10)4
2022 SeqTR: A Simple Yet Universal Network for Visual Grounding
Yiyi Zhou, Yunhang Shen, Gen Luo, Xingjia Pan, Mingbao Lin, Chao Chen 0026, Liujuan Cao, Xiaoshuai Sun, Rongrong Ji
ECCV (35)7
2022 Attention-Guided Discriminative Region Localization and Label Distribution Learning for Bone Age Assessment
abstract
Bone age assessment (BAA) is clinically important as it can be used to diagnose endocrine and metabolic disorders during child development. Existing deep learning based methods for classifying bone age use the global image as input, or exploit local information by annotating extra bounding boxes or key points. However, training with the global image underutilizes discriminative local information, while providing extra annotations is expensive and subjective. In this paper, we propose an attention-guided approach to automatically localize the discriminative regions for BAA without any extra annotations. Specifically, we first train a classification model to learn the attention maps of the discriminative regions, finding the hand region, the most discriminative region (the carpal bones), and the next most discriminative region (the metacarpal bones). Guided by those attention maps, we then crop the informative local regions from the original image and aggregate different regions for BAA. Instead of taking BAA as a general regression task, which is suboptimal due to the label ambiguity problem in the age label space, we propose using joint age distribution learning and expectation regression, which makes use of the ordinal relationship among hand images with different individual ages and leads to more robust age estimation. Extensive experiments are conducted on the RSNA pediatric bone age data set. Without using extra manual annotations, our method achieves competitive results compared with existing state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods that require manual annotation. Code is available at https://github.com/chenchao666/Bone-Age-Assessment.
Chao Chen 0026, Lanjuan Li, William Speier, Corey W. Arnold
IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informatics1
2021 Robust and high-order correlation alignment for unsupervised domain adaptation
Zhaowei Cheng, Chao Chen 0026
Neural Comput. Appl.2
2021 Towards self-similarity consistency and feature discrimination for unsupervised domain adaptation
Chao Chen 0026, Zhihang Fu, Zhaowei Cheng
Signal Process. Image Commun.1
2020 HoMM: Higher-Order Moment Matching for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
abstract
Minimizing the discrepancy of feature distributions between different domains is one of the most promising directions in unsupervised domain adaptation. From the perspective of moment matching, most existing discrepancy-based methods are designed to match the second-order or lower moments, which however, have limited expression of statistical characteristic for non-Gaussian distributions. In this work, we propose a Higher-order Moment Matching (HoMM) method, and further extend the HoMM into reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS). In particular, our proposed HoMM can perform arbitrary-order moment matching, we show that the first-order HoMM is equivalent to Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) and the second-order HoMM is equivalent to Correlation Alignment (CORAL). Moreover, HoMM (order≥ 3) is expected to perform fine-grained domain alignment as higher-order statistics can approximate more complex, non-Gaussian distributions. Besides, we also exploit the pseudo-labeled target samples to learn discriminative representations in the target domain, which further improves the transfer performance. Extensive experiments are conducted, showing that our proposed HoMM consistently outperforms the existing moment matching methods by a large margin. Codes are available at https://github.com/chenchao666/HoMM-Master
Chao Chen 0026, Zhihang Fu, Sheng Jin 0002, Zhaowei Cheng, Xian-Sheng Hua 0001
AAAI1
2020 SSAH: Semi-Supervised Adversarial Deep Hashing with Self-Paced Hard Sample Generation
abstract
Deep hashing methods have been proved to be effective and efficient for large-scale Web media search. The success of these data-driven methods largely depends on collecting sufficient labeled data, which is usually a crucial limitation in practical cases. The current solutions to this issue utilize Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to augment data in semi-supervised learning. However, existing GAN-based methods treat image generations and hashing learning as two isolated processes, leading to generation ineffectiveness. Besides, most works fail to exploit the semantic information in unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel Semi-supervised Self-pace Adversarial Hashing method, named SSAH to solve the above problems in a unified framework. The SSAH method consists of an adversarial network (A-Net) and a hashing network (H-Net). To improve the quality of generative images, first, the A-Net learns hard samples with multi-scale occlusions and multi-angle rotated deformations which compete against the learning of accurate hashing codes. Second, we design a novel self-paced hard generation policy to gradually increase the hashing difficulty of generated samples. To make use of the semantic information in unlabeled ones, we propose a semi-supervised consistent loss. The experimental results show that our method can significantly improve state-of-the-art models on both the widely-used hashing datasets and fine-grained datasets.
Sheng Jin 0002, Shangchen Zhou, Yao Liu 0014, Chao Chen 0026, Xiaoshuai Sun, Hongxun Yao, Xian-Sheng Hua 0001
AAAI4
2020 Selective Transfer With Reinforced Transfer Network for Partial Domain Adaptation
abstract
One crucial aspect of partial domain adaptation (PDA) is how to select the relevant source samples in the shared classes for knowledge transfer. Previous PDA methods tackle this problem by re-weighting the source samples based on their high-level information (deep features). However, since the domain shift between source and target domains, only using the deep features for sample selection is defective. We argue that it is more reasonable to additionally exploit the pixel-level information for PDA problem, as the appearance difference between outlier source classes and target classes is significantly large. In this paper, we propose a reinforced transfer network (RTNet), which utilizes both high-level and pixel-level information for PDA problem. Our RTNet is composed of a reinforced data selector (RDS) based on reinforcement learning (RL), which filters out the outlier source samples, and a domain adaptation model which minimizes the domain discrepancy in the shared label space. Specifically, in the RDS, we design a novel reward based on the reconstruct errors of selected source samples on the target generator, which introduces the pixel-level information to guide the learning of RDS. Besides, we develope a state containing high-level information, which used by the RDS for sample selection. The proposed RDS is a general module, which can be easily integrated into existing DA models to make them fit the PDA situation. Extensive experiments indicate that RTNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance for PDA tasks on several benchmark datasets.
Chao Chen 0026, Zhaowei Cheng, Boyuan Jiang
CVPR2
2020 Reliable Weighted Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
abstract
Recently, extensive researches have been proposed to address the UDA problem, which aims to learn transferrable models for the unlabeled target domain. Among them, the optimal transport is a promising metric to align the representations of the source and target domains. However, most existing works based on optimal transport ignore the intra-domain structure, only achieving coarse pair-wise matching. The target samples distributed near the edge of the clusters, or far from their corresponding class centers are easily to be misclassified by the decision boundary learned from the source domain. In this paper, we present Reliable Weighted Optimal Transport (RWOT) for unsupervised domain adaptation, including novel Shrinking Subspace Reliability (SSR) and weighted optimal transport strategy. Specifically, SSR exploits spatial prototypical information and intra-domain structure to dynamically measure the sample-level domain discrepancy across domains. Besides, the weighted optimal transport strategy based on SSR is exploited to achieve the precise-pair-wise optimal transport procedure, which reduces negative transfer brought by the samples near decision boundaries in the target domain. RWOT also equips with the discriminative centroid clustering exploitation strategy to learn transfer features. A thorough evaluation shows that RWOT outperforms existing state-of-the-art method on standard domain adaptation benchmarks.
Renjun Xu, Pelen Liu, Chao Chen 0026, Jindong Wang 0001
CVPR4
2020 Deep joint two-stream Wasserstein auto-encoder and selective attention alignment for unsupervised domain adaptation
Chao Chen 0026, Zhaowei Cheng
Neural Comput. Appl.2
2020 Deep Dual-Stream Network with Scale Context Selection Attention Module for Semantic Segmentation
Chenfeng Xu, Chao Chen 0026
Neural Process. Lett.4
2019 Joint Domain Alignment and Discriminative Feature Learning for Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation
abstract
Recently, considerable effort has been devoted to deep domain adaptation in computer vision and machine learning communities. However, most of existing work only concentrates on learning shared feature representation by minimizing the distribution discrepancy across different domains. Due to the fact that all the domain alignment approaches can only reduce, but not remove the domain shift, target domain samples distributed near the edge of the clusters, or far from their corresponding class centers are easily to be misclassified by the hyperplane learned from the source domain. To alleviate this issue, we propose to joint domain alignment and discriminative feature learning, which could benefit both domain alignment and final classification. Specifically, an instance-based discriminative feature learning method and a center-based discriminative feature learning method are proposed, both of which guarantee the domain invariant features with better intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Extensive experiments show that learning the discriminative features in the shared feature space can significantly boost the performance of deep domain adaptation methods.
Chao Chen 0026, Boyuan Jiang
AAAI1
2019 Class-Level Adaptation Network with Self Training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
abstract
Deep learning has been widely used in various tasks. However, in real-world scenarios, obtaining various dataset with labels is time-consuming and difficult. Most models are trained in simulated scenarios, and such models degrade in real-world scenarios. Unsupervised domain adaptation is a branch of transfer learning, which utilizes a large number of labeled source domain data to improve the performance of the model in the target domain with limited or missing labels through knowledge transfer. However, most of the previous work neglected the category information when aligning the distribution between source and target domains, which led to the emergence of negative transfer. To address this problem, we propose the class-level adaptation network (CLAN) optimizing a novel metric which makes the centers of each class in source and target domains are close. Specifically, the class center of the source domain is generated by the labels of the source samples, while the class center of the target domain without any label is generated by the high confidence pseudo labels of the target samples. Technically, CLAN matches each target sample to the nearest center in the source domain and assigns an example a high confidence pseudo label by considering a threshold. Extensive experiments indicate that the combination of the aforementioned two models can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Office-31 and digital domain adaptation benchmarks.
Yuncheng Jin, Zhaowei Cheng, Chao Chen 0026
BDCAT4
2019 Joint Domain Matching and Classification for cross-domain adaptation via ELM
Chao Chen 0026, Buyuan Jiang, Zhaowei Cheng
Neurocomputing1
2019 Holistic CNN Compression via Low-Rank Decomposition with Knowledge Transfer
abstract
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable success in various computer vision tasks, which are extremely powerful to deal with massive training data by using tens of millions of parameters. However, CNNs often cost significant memory and computation consumption, which prohibits their usage in resource-limited environments such as mobile or embedded devices. To address the above issues, the existing approaches typically focus on either accelerating the convolutional layers or compressing the fully-connected layers separatedly, without pursuing a joint optimum. In this paper, we overcome such a limitation by introducing a holistic CNN compression framework, termed LRDKT, which works throughout both convolutional and fully-connected layers. First, a low-rank decomposition (LRD) scheme is proposed to remove redundancies across both convolutional kernels and fully-connected matrices, which has a novel closed-form solver to significantly improve the efficiency of the existing iterative optimization solvers. Second, a novel knowledge transfer (KT) based training scheme is introduced. To recover the accumulated accuracy loss and overcome the vanishing gradient, KT explicitly aligns outputs and intermediate responses from a teacher (original) network to its student (compressed) network. We have comprehensively analyzed and evaluated the compression and speedup ratios of the proposed model on MNIST and ILSVRC 2012 benchmarks. In both benchmarks, the proposed scheme has demonstrated superior performance gains over the state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate the proposed compression scheme for the task of transfer learning, including domain adaptation and object detection, which show exciting performance gains over the state-of-the-arts. Our source code and compressed models are available at https://github.com/ShaohuiLin/LRDKT.
Shaohui Lin, Rongrong Ji, Chao Chen 0026, Dacheng Tao, Jiebo Luo 0001
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.3
2017 ESPACE: Accelerating Convolutional Neural Networks via Eliminating Spatial and Channel Redundancy
abstract
Recent years have witnessed an extensive popularity of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in various computer vision and artificial intelligence applications. However, the performance gains have come at a cost of substantially intensive computation complexity, which prohibits its usage inresource-limited applications like mobile or embedded devices. While increasing attention has been paid to the acceleration of internal network structure, the redundancy of visual input is rarely considered. In this paper, we make the first attempt of reducing spatial and channel redundancy directly from the visual input for CNNs acceleration. The proposed method, termed ESPACE (Elimination of SPAtial and Channel rEdundancy), works by the following three steps: First, the 3D channel redundancy of convolutional layers is reduced by a set of low-rank approximation of convolutional filters. Second, a novel mask based selective processing scheme is proposed, which further speedups the convolution operations via skipping unsalient spatial locations of the visual input. Third, the accelerated network is fine-tuned using the training data via back-propagation. The proposed method is evaluated on ImageNet 2012 with implementations on two widely adopted CNNs, i.e. AlexNet and GoogLeNet. In comparison to several recent methods of CNN acceleration, the proposed scheme has demonstrated new state-of-the-art acceleration performance by a factor of 5.48* and 4.12* speedup on AlexNet and GoogLeNet, respectively, with a minimal decrease in classification accuracy.
Shaohui Lin, Rongrong Ji, Chao Chen 0026, Feiyue Huang
AAAI3
2015 A Cross-media Sentiment Analytics Platform For Microblog
abstract
In this demo, a cross-media public sentiment analysis system is presented. The system presents and visualizes the sentiments of microblog data by organizing the results by region, topic, and content, respectively. Such sentiment is obtained by fusing of sentiment classification scores from both visual and textual channel. In such a way, social multimedia sentiment is shown in a multi-level and user-friendly form.
Chao Chen 0026, Fuhai Chen, Donglin Cao, Rongrong Ji
ACM Multimedia1