Person re-identification (re-ID) aims to retrieve the same person across different cameras. In practice, it still remains a challenging task due to background clutter, variations on body poses and view conditions, inaccurate bounding box detection, etc. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel multi-receptive field attention (MRFA) module that utilizes filters of various sizes to help network focusing on informative pixels. Besides, we present a view-specific mechanism that guides attention module to handle the variation of view conditions. Moreover, we introduce a Gaussian horizontal random cropping/padding method which further improves the robustness of our proposed network. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of each component. Our method achieves 95.5% / 88.1% in rank-1 / mAP on Market-1501, 88.9% / 80.0% on DukeMTMC-reID, 81.1% / 78.8% on CUHK03 labeled dataset and 78.9% / 75.3% on CUHK03 detected dataset, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods.

Community detection has been one of the fundamental problems in network analysis. Results from community detection (for example, grouping of products by latent category) can also serve as information nuggets to other business applications, such as product recommendation or taxonomy building. Because several real networks are naturally directed, e.g. World Wide Web, some recent studies proposed algorithms for detecting various types of communities in a directed network. However, few of them considered that nodes play two different roles, source and terminal, in a directed network.

The booming of e-commerce in recent years has led to the generation of large amounts of product search log data. Product search log is a unique new data with much valuable information and knowledge about user preferences over product attributes that is often hard to obtain from other sources. While regular search logs (e.g., Web search logs) contain click-throughs for unstructured text documents (e.g., web pages), product search logs contain clickth-roughs for structured entities defined by a set of attributes and their values. For instance, a laptop can be defined by its size, color, cpu, ram, etc. Such structures in product entities offer us opportunities to mine and discover detailed useful knowledge about user preferences at the attribute level, but they also raise significant challenges for mining due to the lack of attribute-level observations.

The ability to let users search for products conveniently in product database is critical to the success of e-commerce. Although structured query languages (e.g. SQL) can be used to effectively access the product database, it is very difficult for end users to learn and use. In this paper, we study how to optimize search over structured product entities (represented by specifications) with keyword queries such as "cheap gaming laptop". One major difficulty in this problem is the vocabulary gap between the specifications of products in the database and the keywords people use in search queries. To solve the problem, we propose a novel probabilistic entity retrieval model based on query generation, where the entities would be ranked for a given keyword query based on the likelihood that a user who likes an entity would pose the query. Different ways to estimate the model parameters would lead to different variants of ranking functions. We start with simple estimates based on the specifications of entities, and then leverage user reviews and product search logs to improve the estimation. Multiple estimation algorithms are developed based on Maximum Likelihood and Maximum a Posteriori estimators. We evaluate the proposed product entity retrieval models on two newly created product search test collections. The results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the existing retrieval models, benefiting from the modeling of attribute-level relevance. Despite the focus on product retrieval, the proposed modeling method is general and opens up many new opportunities in analyzing structured entity data with unstructured text data. We show the proposed probabilistic model can be easily adapted for many interesting applications including facet generation and review annotation.