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Sparse voxel-based 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used for various 3D vision tasks. Sparse voxel-based 3D CNNs create sparse non-empty voxels from the 3D input and perform 3D convolution operations on them only. We propose a simple yet effective padding scheme --- interpolation-aware padding to pad a few empty voxels adjacent to the non-empty voxels and involve them in the 3D CNN computation so that all neighboring voxels exist when computing point-wise features via the trilinear interpolation. For fine-grained 3D vision tasks where point-wise features are essential, like semantic segmentation and 3D detection, our network achieves higher prediction accuracy than the existing networks using the nearest neighbor interpolation or the normalized trilinear interpolation with the zero-padding or the octree-padding scheme. Through extensive comparisons on various 3D segmentation and detection tasks, we demonstrate the superiority of 3D sparse CNNs with our padding scheme in conjunction with feature interpolation.

Multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) have been successfully used to represent 3D shapes implicitly and compactly, by mapping 3D coordinates to the corresponding signed distance values or occupancy values. In this paper, we propose a novel positional encoding scheme, called Spline Positional Encoding, to map the input coordinates to a high dimensional space before passing them to MLPs, for helping to recover 3D signed distance fields with fine-scale geometric details from unorganized 3D point clouds. We verified the superiority of our approach over other positional encoding schemes on tasks of 3D shape reconstruction from input point clouds and shape space learning. The efficacy of our approach extended to image reconstruction is also demonstrated and evaluated., Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 2021; Code: https://github.com/microsoft/SplinePosEnc

Conversion rate (CVR) prediction is one of the most critical tasks for digital display advertising. Commercial systems often require to update models in an online learning manner to catch up with the evolving data distribution. However, conversions usually do not happen immediately after a user click. This may result in inaccurate labeling, which is called delayed feedback problem. In previous studies, delayed feedback problem is handled either by waiting positive label for a long period of time, or by consuming the negative sample on its arrival and then insert a positive duplicate when a conversion happens later. Indeed, there is a trade-off between waiting for more accurate labels and utilizing fresh data, which is not considered in existing works. To strike a balance in this trade-off, we propose Elapsed-Time Sampling Delayed Feedback Model (ES-DFM), which models the relationship between the observed conversion distribution and the true conversion distribution. Then we optimize the expectation of true conversion distribution via importance sampling under the elapsed-time sampling distribution. We further estimate the importance weight for each instance, which is used as the weight of loss function in CVR prediction. To demonstrate the effectiveness of ES-DFM, we conduct extensive experiments on a public data and a private industrial dataset. Experimental results confirm that our method consistently outperforms the previous state-of-the-art results., Comment: This paper has been accepted by AAAI 2021

Although unsupervised feature learning has demonstrated its advantages to reducing the workload of data labeling and network design in many fields, existing unsupervised 3D learning methods still cannot offer a generic network for various shape analysis tasks with competitive performance to supervised methods. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method for learning a generic and efficient shape encoding network for different shape analysis tasks. The key idea of our method is to jointly encode and learn shape and point features from unlabeled 3D point clouds. For this purpose, we adapt HR-Net to octree-based convolutional neural networks for jointly encoding shape and point features with fused multiresolution subnetworks and design a simple-yet-efficient Multiresolution Instance Discrimination (MID) loss for jointly learning the shape and point features. Our network takes a 3D point cloud as input and output both shape and point features. After training, the network is concatenated with simple task-specific back-end layers and fine-tuned for different shape analysis tasks. We evaluate the efficacy and generality of our method and validate our network and loss design with a set of shape analysis tasks, including shape classification, semantic shape segmentation, as well as shape registration tasks. With simple back-ends, our network demonstrates the best performance among all unsupervised methods and achieves competitive performance to supervised methods, especially in tasks with a small labeled dataset. For fine-grained shape segmentation, our method even surpasses existing supervised methods by a large margin., Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2021. Code: https://github.com/microsoft/O-CNN/blob/master/docs/unsupervised.md