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We introduce Imagen 3, a latent diffusion model that generates high quality images from text prompts. We describe our quality and responsibility evaluations. Imagen 3 is preferred over other state-of-the-art (SOTA) models at the time of evaluation. In addition, we discuss issues around safety and representation, as well as methods we used to minimize the potential harm of our models.

Visual tracking fundamentally involves regressing the state of the target in each frame of a video. Despite significant progress, existing regression-based trackers still tend to experience failures and inaccuracies. To enhance the precision of target estimation, this paper proposes a tracking technique based on robust regression. Firstly, we introduce a novel robust linear regression estimator, which achieves favorable performance when the error vector follows i.i.d Gaussian-Laplacian distribution. Secondly, we design an iterative process to quickly solve the problem of outliers. In fact, the coefficients are obtained by Iterative Gradient Descent and Threshold Selection algorithm (IGDTS). In addition, we expend IGDTS to a generative tracker, and apply IGDTS-distance to measure the deviation between the sample and the model. Finally, we propose an update scheme to capture the appearance changes of the tracked object and ensure that the model is updated correctly. Experimental results on several challenging image sequences show that the proposed tracker outperformance existing trackers.

The neighbor-based method has become a powerful tool to handle the outlier detection problem, which aims to infer the abnormal degree of the sample based on the compactness of the sample and its neighbors. However, the existing methods commonly focus on designing different processes to locate outliers in the dataset, while the contributions of different types neighbors to outlier detection has not been well discussed. To this end, this paper studies the neighbor in the existing outlier detection algorithms and a taxonomy is introduced, which uses the three-level components of information, neighbor and methodology to define hybrid methods. This taxonomy can serve as a paradigm where a novel neighbor-based outlier detection method can be proposed by combining different components in this taxonomy. A large number of comparative experiments were conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets in terms of performance comparison and case study, and the results show that reverse K-nearest neighbor based methods achieve promising performance and dynamic selection method is suitable for working in high-dimensional space. Notably, it is verified that rationally selecting components from this taxonomy may create an algorithms superior to existing methods.

Learning with noisy labels has become an effective strategy for enhancing the robustness of models, which enables models to better tolerate inaccurate data. Existing methods either focus on optimizing the loss function to mitigate the interference from noise, or design procedures to detect potential noise and correct errors. However, their effectiveness is often compromised in representation learning due to the dilemma where models overfit to noisy labels. To address this issue, this paper proposes a relation modeling and distillation framework that models inter-sample relationships via self-supervised learning and employs knowledge distillation to enhance understanding of latent associations, which mitigate the impact of noisy labels. Specifically, the proposed method, termed RMDNet, includes two main modules, where the relation modeling (RM) module implements the contrastive learning technique to learn representations of all data, an unsupervised approach that effectively eliminates the interference of noisy tags on feature extraction. The relation-guided representation learning (RGRL) module utilizes inter-sample relation learned from the RM module to calibrate the representation distribution for noisy samples, which is capable of improving the generalization of the model in the inference phase. Notably, the proposed RMDNet is a plug-and-play framework that can integrate multiple methods to its advantage. Extensive experiments were conducted on two datasets, including performance comparison, ablation study, in-depth analysis and case study. The results show that RMDNet can learn discriminative representations for noisy data, which results in superior performance than the existing methods.

Several prior studies have suggested that word frequency biases can cause the Bert model to learn indistinguishable sentence embeddings. Contrastive learning schemes such as SimCSE and ConSERT have already been adopted successfully in unsupervised sentence embedding to improve the quality of embeddings by reducing this bias. However, these methods still introduce new biases such as sentence length bias and false negative sample bias, that hinders model's ability to learn more fine-grained semantics. In this paper, we reexamine the challenges of contrastive sentence embedding learning from a debiasing perspective and argue that effectively eliminating the influence of various biases is crucial for learning high-quality sentence embeddings. We think all those biases are introduced by simple rules for constructing training data in contrastive learning and the key for contrastive learning sentence embedding is to mimic the distribution of training data in supervised machine learning in unsupervised way. We propose a novel contrastive framework for sentence embedding, termed DebCSE, which can eliminate the impact of these biases by an inverse propensity weighted sampling method to select high-quality positive and negative pairs according to both the surface and semantic similarity between sentences. Extensive experiments on semantic textual similarity (STS) benchmarks reveal that DebCSE significantly outperforms the latest state-of-the-art models with an average Spearman's correlation coefficient of 80.33% on BERTbase.

We propose a novel multimodal video benchmark - the Perception Test - to evaluate the perception and reasoning skills of pre-trained multimodal models (e.g. Flamingo, SeViLA, or GPT-4). Compared to existing benchmarks that focus on computational tasks (e.g. classification, detection or tracking), the Perception Test focuses on skills (Memory, Abstraction, Physics, Semantics) and types of reasoning (descriptive, explanatory, predictive, counterfactual) across video, audio, and text modalities, to provide a comprehensive and efficient evaluation tool. The benchmark probes pre-trained models for their transfer capabilities, in a zero-shot / few-shot or limited finetuning regime. For these purposes, the Perception Test introduces 11.6k real-world videos, 23s average length, designed to show perceptually interesting situations, filmed by around 100 participants worldwide. The videos are densely annotated with six types of labels (multiple-choice and grounded video question-answers, object and point tracks, temporal action and sound segments), enabling both language and non-language evaluations. The fine-tuning and validation splits of the benchmark are publicly available (CC-BY license), in addition to a challenge server with a held-out test split. Human baseline results compared to state-of-the-art video QA models show a substantial gap in performance (91.4% vs 46.2%), suggesting that there is significant room for improvement in multimodal video understanding. Dataset, baseline code, and challenge server are available at https://github.com/deepmind/perception_test, Comment: 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023) Track on Datasets and Benchmarks

New findings in natural language processing (NLP) demonstrate that the strong memorization capability contributes a lot to the success of Large Language Models (LLM). This inspires us to explicitly bring an independent memory mechanism into CTR ranking model to learn and memorize cross features' representations. In this paper, we propose multi-Hash Codebook NETwork (HCNet) as the memory mechanism for efficiently learning and memorizing representations of cross features in CTR tasks. HCNet uses a multi-hash codebook as the main memory place and the whole memory procedure consists of three phases: multi-hash addressing, memory restoring, and feature shrinking. We also propose a new CTR model named MemoNet which combines HCNet with a DNN backbone. Extensive experimental results on three public datasets and online test show that MemoNet reaches superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches. Besides, MemoNet shows scaling law of large language model in NLP, which means we can enlarge the size of the codebook in HCNet to sustainably obtain performance gains. Our work demonstrates the importance and feasibility of learning and memorizing representations of cross features, which sheds light on a new promising research direction.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) estimation has become one of the most fundamental tasks in many real-world applications and various deep models have been proposed. Some research has proved that FiBiNet is one of the best performance models and outperforms all other models on Avazu dataset. However, the large model size of FiBiNet hinders its wider application. In this paper, we propose a novel FiBiNet++ model to redesign FiBiNet's model structure, which greatly reduces model size while further improves its performance. One of the primary techniques involves our proposed "Low Rank Layer" focused on feature interaction, which serves as a crucial driver of achieving a superior compression ratio for models. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that FiBiNet++ effectively reduces non-embedding model parameters of FiBiNet by 12x to 16x on three datasets. On the other hand, FiBiNet++ leads to significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art CTR methods, including FiBiNet.

Click-through rate (CTR) estimation is a fundamental task in personalized advertising and recommender systems and it's important for ranking models to effectively capture complex high-order features.Inspired by the success of ELMO and Bert in NLP field, which dynamically refine word embedding according to the context sentence information where the word appears, we think it's also important to dynamically refine each feature's embedding layer by layer according to the context information contained in input instance in CTR estimation tasks. We can effectively capture the useful feature interactions for each feature in this way. In this paper, We propose a novel CTR Framework named ContextNet that implicitly models high-order feature interactions by dynamically refining each feature's embedding according to the input context. Specifically, ContextNet consists of two key components: contextual embedding module and ContextNet block. Contextual embedding module aggregates contextual information for each feature from input instance and ContextNet block maintains each feature's embedding layer by layer and dynamically refines its representation by merging contextual high-order interaction information into feature embedding. To make the framework specific, we also propose two models(ContextNet-PFFN and ContextNet-SFFN) under this framework by introducing linear contextual embedding network and two non-linear mapping sub-network in ContextNet block. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets and the experiment results demonstrate that our proposed ContextNet-PFFN and ContextNet-SFFN model outperform state-of-the-art models such as DeepFM and xDeepFM significantly., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2102.07619

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays important role in personalized advertising and recommender systems. Though many models have been proposed such as FM, FFM and DeepFM in recent years, feature engineering is still a very important way to improve the model performance in many applications because using raw features can rarely lead to optimal results. For example, the continuous features are usually transformed to the power forms by adding a new feature to allow it to easily form non-linear functions of the feature. However, this kind of feature engineering heavily relies on peoples experience and it is both time consuming and labor consuming. On the other side, concise CTR model with both fast online serving speed and good model performance is critical for many real life applications. In this paper, we propose LeafFM model based on FM to generate new features from the original feature embedding by learning the transformation functions automatically. We also design three concrete Leaf-FM models according to the different strategies of combing the original and the generated features. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real-world datasets and the results show Leaf-FM model outperforms standard FMs by a large margin. Compared with FFMs, Leaf-FM can achieve significantly better performance with much less parameters. In Avazu and Malware dataset, add version Leaf-FM achieves comparable performance with some deep learning based models such as DNN and AutoInt. As an improved FM model, Leaf-FM has the same computation complexity with FM in online serving phase and it means Leaf-FM is applicable in many industry applications because of its better performance and high computation efficiency.

Click-Through Rate(CTR) estimation has become one of the most fundamental tasks in many real-world applications and it's important for ranking models to effectively capture complex high-order features. Shallow feed-forward network is widely used in many state-of-the-art DNN models such as FNN, DeepFM and xDeepFM to implicitly capture high-order feature interactions. However, some research has proved that addictive feature interaction, particular feed-forward neural networks, is inefficient in capturing common feature interaction. To resolve this problem, we introduce specific multiplicative operation into DNN ranking system by proposing instance-guided mask which performs element-wise product both on the feature embedding and feed-forward layers guided by input instance. We also turn the feed-forward layer in DNN model into a mixture of addictive and multiplicative feature interactions by proposing MaskBlock in this paper. MaskBlock combines the layer normalization, instance-guided mask, and feed-forward layer and it is a basic building block to be used to design new ranking model under various configurations. The model consisting of MaskBlock is called MaskNet in this paper and two new MaskNet models are proposed to show the effectiveness of MaskBlock as basic building block for composing high performance ranking systems. The experiment results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed MaskNet models outperform state-of-the-art models such as DeepFM and xDeepFM significantly, which implies MaskBlock is an effective basic building unit for composing new high performance ranking systems., Comment: In Proceedings of DLP-KDD 2021. ACM,Singapore. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2006.12753

As a pre-trained Transformer model, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) has achieved ground-breaking performance on multiple NLP tasks. On the other hand, Boosting is a popular ensemble learning technique which combines many base classifiers and has been demonstrated to yield better generalization performance in many machine learning tasks. Some works have indicated that ensemble of BERT can further improve the application performance. However, current ensemble approaches focus on bagging or stacking and there has not been much effort on exploring the boosting. In this work, we proposed a novel Boosting BERT model to integrate multi-class boosting into the BERT. Our proposed model uses the pre-trained Transformer as the base classifier to choose harder training sets to fine-tune and gains the benefits of both the pre-training language knowledge and boosting ensemble in NLP tasks. We evaluate the proposed model on the GLUE dataset and 3 popular Chinese NLU benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms BERT on all datasets and proves its effectiveness in many NLP tasks. Replacing the BERT base with RoBERTa as base classifier, BoostingBERT achieves new state-of-the-art results in several NLP Tasks. We also use knowledge distillation within the "teacher-student" framework to reduce the computational overhead and model storage of BoostingBERT while keeping its performance for practical application., Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures

Advertising and feed ranking are essential to many Internet companies such as Facebook. Among many real-world advertising and feed ranking systems, click through rate (CTR) prediction plays a central role. In recent years, many neural network based CTR models have been proposed and achieved success such as Factorization-Machine Supported Neural Networks, DeepFM and xDeepFM. Many of them contain two commonly used components: embedding layer and MLP hidden layers. On the other side, gating mechanism is also widely applied in many research fields such as computer vision(CV) and natural language processing(NLP). Some research has proved that gating mechanism improves the trainability of non-convex deep neural networks. Inspired by these observations, we propose a novel model named GateNet which introduces either the feature embedding gate or the hidden gate to the embedding layer or hidden layers of DNN CTR models, respectively. The feature embedding gate provides a learnable feature gating module to select salient latent information from the feature-level. The hidden gate helps the model to implicitly capture the high-order interaction more effectively. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate its effectiveness to boost the performance of various state-of-the-art models such as FM, DeepFM and xDeepFM on all datasets.

Normalization has become one of the most fundamental components in many deep neural networks for machine learning tasks while deep neural network has also been widely used in CTR estimation field. Among most of the proposed deep neural network models, few model utilize normalization approaches. Though some works such as Deep & Cross Network (DCN) and Neural Factorization Machine (NFM) use Batch Normalization in MLP part of the structure, there isn't work to thoroughly explore the effect of the normalization on the DNN ranking systems. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study on the effect of widely used normalization schemas by applying the various normalization approaches to both feature embedding and MLP part in DNN model. Extensive experiments are conduct on three real-world datasets and the experiment results demonstrate that the correct normalization significantly enhances model's performance. We also propose a new and effective normalization approaches based on LayerNorm named variance only LayerNorm(VO-LN) in this work. A normalization enhanced DNN model named NormDNN is also proposed based on the above-mentioned observation. As for the reason why normalization works for DNN models in CTR estimation, we find that the variance of normalization plays the main role and give an explanation in this work.

Advertising and feed ranking are essential to many Internet companies such as Facebook and Sina Weibo. Among many real-world advertising and feed ranking systems, click through rate (CTR) prediction plays a central role. There are many proposed models in this field such as logistic regression, tree based models, factorization machine based models and deep learning based CTR models. However, many current works calculate the feature interactions in a simple way such as Hadamard product and inner product and they care less about the importance of features. In this paper, a new model named FiBiNET as an abbreviation for Feature Importance and Bilinear feature Interaction NETwork is proposed to dynamically learn the feature importance and fine-grained feature interactions. On the one hand, the FiBiNET can dynamically learn the importance of features via the Squeeze-Excitation network (SENET) mechanism; on the other hand, it is able to effectively learn the feature interactions via bilinear function. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and show that our shallow model outperforms other shallow models such as factorization machine(FM) and field-aware factorization machine(FFM). In order to improve performance further, we combine a classical deep neural network(DNN) component with the shallow model to be a deep model. The deep FiBiNET consistently outperforms the other state-of-the-art deep models such as DeepFM and extreme deep factorization machine(XdeepFM)., Comment: 8 pages,5 figures

Click through rate (CTR) estimation is a fundamental task in personalized advertising and recommender systems. Recent years have witnessed the success of both the deep learning based model and attention mechanism in various tasks in computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP). How to combine the attention mechanism with deep CTR model is a promising direction because it may ensemble the advantages of both sides. Although some CTR model such as Attentional Factorization Machine (AFM) has been proposed to model the weight of second order interaction features, we posit the evaluation of feature importance before explicit feature interaction procedure is also important for CTR prediction tasks because the model can learn to selectively highlight the informative features and suppress less useful ones if the task has many input features. In this paper, we propose a new neural CTR model named Field Attentive Deep Field-aware Factorization Machine (FAT-DeepFFM) by combining the Deep Field-aware Factorization Machine (DeepFFM) with Compose-Excitation network (CENet) field attention mechanism which is proposed by us as an enhanced version of Squeeze-Excitation network (SENet) to highlight the feature importance. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and the experiment results show that FAT-DeepFFM achieves the best performance and obtains different improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. We also compare two kinds of attention mechanisms (attention before explicit feature interaction vs. attention after explicit feature interaction) and demonstrate that the former one outperforms the latter one significantly., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures