We propose two recommendation algorithms for e-commerce with supply limits, a scenario that has not been intensively studied in the literature. One algorithm is a linear programming-based algorithm that uses historical data to approximate customer arrival patterns and generate shadow prices for inventories. The price of inventory can be introduced to existing recommendation algorithms to obtain adjusted rankings for recommendation. The other algorithm balances expected revenue and inventory consumption, and it uses a simple penalty function to reduce the chance of recommending low-inventory-level products. Both algorithms are suitable for online recommendation systems for grocery stores with both online and offline channels, and can incorporate the features of perishable products, which need to be sold within limited time. Both algorithms are tested in a simulation using estimated parameters from Freshippo, a supermarket owned by the Alibaba Group. The numerical results show that both algorithms can generate higher sales volume and higher revenue.

Product sales forecasting plays a fundamental role in enhancing timeliness of product delivery in E-Commerce. Among many heterogeneous features relevant to sales forecasting, promotion campaigns held in E-Commerce and competing relation between substitutable products would greatly complicate the matter. Unfortunately, these factors are usually overlooked in the existing literature, since the conventional time series analysis based techniques mainly consider the sales records alone. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural framework for sales forecasting in E-Commerce, named DSF. In DSF, sales forecasting is formulated as a sequence-to-sequence learning problem where the sales is estimated in a recurrent fashion. On top of the decoder, we introduce a sales residual network to explicitly model the impact of competing relation when a promotion campaign is launched for a target item or some substitutable counterparts. Extensive experiments are conducted over two real-world datasets in different domains from Taobao E-Commerce platform. Our results demonstrate that the proposed DSF obtains substantial performance gain over the traditional baselines and up-to-date deep learning alternatives in terms of forecasting accuracy. Further comparison shows that DSF has also surpassed the deep learning based solution currently depolyed in Taobao platform.

In this work, we develop an effective person search algorithm with natural language descriptions. The contributions of this work mainly include two aspects. First, we design a baseline language person search framework including three basic components: a deep CNN model to extract visual features, a bi-directional LSTM to encode language descriptions and the triplet loss to conduct cross-modal feature embedding. Second, we propose a novel mutually connected classification loss to fully exploit the identity-level information, which not only introduces the identification information into both image and language descriptions but also encourages the cross-modal classification probabilities of the same identity to be more similar. The experimental results on the CUHK-PEDES dataset demonstrate that our method achieves significantly better performance than other state-of-the-art algorithms.

Online tracking a specific person from a low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a very interesting and challenging problem to be solved. However, there exists no large-scale aerial video dataset regarding this online single person tracking (OSPT) task. To promote the study of the OSPT problem in UAV, we first construct a new benchmark dataset including 100 fully annotated aerial videos with nearly 130K frames and 11 challenging factors. Second, we evaluate several state-of-the-art online trackers with real-time performance using our dataset, considering the potential applications in the UAV platform. In addition, with respect to the OSPT problem, we attempt to design a new baseline method with the combination of tracking, detection and re-identification and conduct detailed analysis of different components. This method achieves much better performance than the existing online trackers, which will serve as a new baseline for our benchmark.

User reviews contain rich semantics towards the preference of users to features of items. Recently, many deep learning based solutions have been proposed by exploiting reviews for recommendation. The attention mechanism is mainly adopted in these works to identify words or aspects that are important for rating prediction. However, it is still hard to understand whether a user likes or dislikes an aspect of an item according to what viewpoint the user holds and to what extent, without examining the review details. Here, we consider a pair of a viewpoint held by a user and an aspect of an item as a logic unit. Reasoning a rating behavior by discovering the informative logic units from the reviews and resolving their corresponding sentiments could enable a better rating prediction with explanation.