现有的广告点击率（CTR）预测模型主要取决于行为ID功能，这些功能是根据历史用户AD交互所学习的。然而，依赖历史用户行为的行为ID功能是不可行的，可以在没有以前与用户互动的情况下描述新广告。为了克服对新广告建模的行为ID特征的局限性，我们利用广告中的视觉内容来提高CTR预测模型的性能。具体来说，我们根据其视觉内容将每个广告映射到一组视觉ID中。这些视觉ID进一步用于生成可视觉嵌入，以增强CTR预测模型。我们将视觉ID的学习分为有监督的量化问题。由于缺乏广告中商业图像的类标签，因此我们利用图像文本描述作为监督，以优化图像提取器以生成有效的视觉ID。同时，由于硬量化是不可差异的，因此我们软化量化操作以使其支持端到端网络培训。将每个图像映射到视觉ID之后，我们根据过去积累的历史用户AD交互学习每个视觉ID的嵌入。由于视觉ID嵌入仅取决于视觉内容，因此它概括为新广告。同时，嵌入视觉ID补充了AD行为ID嵌入。因此，它可以大大提高CTR预测模型的性能，以前依赖于积累了丰富用户行为的新广告和广告的行为ID功能。将视觉ID嵌入在BAIDU在线广告的CTR预测模型中后，AD的平均CTR提高了1.46％，总费用增加了1.10％。

通信技术的进步和智能手机的普及促进了视频广告的蓬勃发展。百度是世界领先的搜索引擎公司之一，每天收到数十亿个搜索查询。如何将视频广告与用户搜索配对是百度视频广告的核心任务。由于模态差距，比传统查询对象检索和图像到图像搜索更具挑战性的查询性检索更具挑战性。传统上，查询到视频检索是通过查询到标题检索来解决的，当瓷砖的质量不高时，这是不可靠的。近年来，随着计算机视觉和自然语言处理的快速进展，基于内容的搜索方法变得有望在查询到视频检索中。受益于大规模数据集的预处理，一些基于跨模式关注的Visionbert方法在许多视觉语言任务中不仅在学术界而且在行业中都取得了出色的表现。然而，跨模式关注的昂贵计算成本使得在工业应用中进行大规模搜索是不切实际的。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个基于树的组合注意网络（TCAN），该网络最近在百度的动态视频广告平台上推出。它提供了一种实用的解决方案，可以在大规模查询到视频搜索中部署大量的跨模式关注。在启动基于树的组合注意网络之后，点击率提高了2.29 \％，转化率提高了2.63 \％。

Weakly-supervised object localization aims to indicate the category as well as the scope of an object in an image given only the image-level labels. Most of the existing works are based on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and endeavor to enlarge the discriminative area inside the activation map to perceive the whole object, yet ignore the co-occurrence confounder of the object and context (e.g., fish and water), which makes the model inspection hard to distinguish object boundaries. Besides, the use of CAM also brings a dilemma problem that the classification and localization always suffer from a performance gap and can not reach their highest accuracy simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a casual knowledge distillation method, dubbed KD-CI-CAM, to address these two under-explored issues in one go. More specifically, we tackle the co-occurrence context confounder problem via causal intervention (CI), which explores the causalities among image features, contexts, and categories to eliminate the biased object-context entanglement in the class activation maps. Based on the de-biased object feature, we additionally propose a multi-teacher causal distillation framework to balance the absorption of classification knowledge and localization knowledge during model training. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of KD-CI-CAM in learning clear object boundaries from confounding contexts and addressing the dilemma problem between classification and localization performance.

To generate high quality rendering images for real time applications, it is often to trace only a few samples-per-pixel (spp) at a lower resolution and then supersample to the high resolution. Based on the observation that the rendered pixels at a low resolution are typically highly aliased, we present a novel method for neural supersampling based on ray tracing 1/4-spp samples at the high resolution. Our key insight is that the ray-traced samples at the target resolution are accurate and reliable, which makes the supersampling an interpolation problem. We present a mask-reinforced neural network to reconstruct and interpolate high-quality image sequences. First, a novel temporal accumulation network is introduced to compute the correlation between current and previous features to significantly improve their temporal stability. Then a reconstruct network based on a multi-scale U-Net with skip connections is adopted for reconstruction and generation of the desired high-resolution image. Experimental results and comparisons have shown that our proposed method can generate higher quality results of supersampling, without increasing the total number of ray-tracing samples, over current state-of-the-art methods.

In the scenario of black-box adversarial attack, the target model's parameters are unknown, and the attacker aims to find a successful adversarial perturbation based on query feedback under a query budget. Due to the limited feedback information, existing query-based black-box attack methods often require many queries for attacking each benign example. To reduce query cost, we propose to utilize the feedback information across historical attacks, dubbed example-level adversarial transferability. Specifically, by treating the attack on each benign example as one task, we develop a meta-learning framework by training a meta-generator to produce perturbations conditioned on benign examples. When attacking a new benign example, the meta generator can be quickly fine-tuned based on the feedback information of the new task as well as a few historical attacks to produce effective perturbations. Moreover, since the meta-train procedure consumes many queries to learn a generalizable generator, we utilize model-level adversarial transferability to train the meta-generator on a white-box surrogate model, then transfer it to help the attack against the target model. The proposed framework with the two types of adversarial transferability can be naturally combined with any off-the-shelf query-based attack methods to boost their performance, which is verified by extensive experiments.

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has attracted considerable attention as a gradient-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method. Since the introduction of DARTS, there has been little work done on adapting the action space based on state-of-art architecture design principles for CNNs. In this work, we aim to address this gap by incrementally augmenting the DARTS search space with micro-design changes inspired by ConvNeXt and studying the trade-off between accuracy, evaluation layer count, and computational cost. To this end, we introduce the Pseudo-Inverted Bottleneck conv block intending to reduce the computational footprint of the inverted bottleneck block proposed in ConvNeXt. Our proposed architecture is much less sensitive to evaluation layer count and outperforms a DARTS network with similar size significantly, at layer counts as small as 2. Furthermore, with less layers, not only does it achieve higher accuracy with lower GMACs and parameter count, GradCAM comparisons show that our network is able to better detect distinctive features of target objects compared to DARTS.

We study estimation and testing in the Poisson regression model with noisy high dimensional covariates, which has wide applications in analyzing noisy big data. Correcting for the estimation bias due to the covariate noise leads to a non-convex target function to minimize. Treating the high dimensional issue further leads us to augment an amenable penalty term to the target function. We propose to estimate the regression parameter through minimizing the penalized target function. We derive the L1 and L2 convergence rates of the estimator and prove the variable selection consistency. We further establish the asymptotic normality of any subset of the parameters, where the subset can have infinitely many components as long as its cardinality grows sufficiently slow. We develop Wald and score tests based on the asymptotic normality of the estimator, which permits testing of linear functions of the members if the subset. We examine the finite sample performance of the proposed tests by extensive simulation. Finally, the proposed method is successfully applied to the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative study, which motivated this work initially.

Video-language pre-training has advanced the performance of various downstream video-language tasks. However, most previous methods directly inherit or adapt typical image-language pre-training paradigms to video-language pre-training, thus not fully exploiting the unique characteristic of video, i.e., temporal. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Temporal-Aware video-language pre-training framework, HiTeA, with two novel pre-training tasks for modeling cross-modal alignment between moments and texts as well as the temporal relations of video-text pairs. Specifically, we propose a cross-modal moment exploration task to explore moments in videos, which results in detailed video moment representation. Besides, the inherent temporal relations are captured by aligning video-text pairs as a whole in different time resolutions with multi-modal temporal relation exploration task. Furthermore, we introduce the shuffling test to evaluate the temporal reliance of datasets and video-language pre-training models. We achieve state-of-the-art results on 15 well-established video-language understanding and generation tasks, especially on temporal-oriented datasets (e.g., SSv2-Template and SSv2-Label) with 8.6% and 11.1% improvement respectively. HiTeA also demonstrates strong generalization ability when directly transferred to downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. Models and demo will be available on ModelScope.

Function approximation (FA) has been a critical component in solving large zero-sum games. Yet, little attention has been given towards FA in solving \textit{general-sum} extensive-form games, despite them being widely regarded as being computationally more challenging than their fully competitive or cooperative counterparts. A key challenge is that for many equilibria in general-sum games, no simple analogue to the state value function used in Markov Decision Processes and zero-sum games exists. In this paper, we propose learning the \textit{Enforceable Payoff Frontier} (EPF) -- a generalization of the state value function for general-sum games. We approximate the optimal \textit{Stackelberg extensive-form correlated equilibrium} by representing EPFs with neural networks and training them by using appropriate backup operations and loss functions. This is the first method that applies FA to the Stackelberg setting, allowing us to scale to much larger games while still enjoying performance guarantees based on FA error. Additionally, our proposed method guarantees incentive compatibility and is easy to evaluate without having to depend on self-play or approximate best-response oracles.

Correlated Equilibrium is a solution concept that is more general than Nash Equilibrium (NE) and can lead to outcomes with better social welfare. However, its natural extension to the sequential setting, the \textit{Extensive Form Correlated Equilibrium} (EFCE), requires a quadratic amount of space to solve, even in restricted settings without randomness in nature. To alleviate these concerns, we apply \textit{subgame resolving}, a technique extremely successful in finding NE in zero-sum games to solving general-sum EFCEs. Subgame resolving refines a correlation plan in an \textit{online} manner: instead of solving for the full game upfront, it only solves for strategies in subgames that are reached in actual play, resulting in significant computational gains. In this paper, we (i) lay out the foundations to quantify the quality of a refined strategy, in terms of the \textit{social welfare} and \textit{exploitability} of correlation plans, (ii) show that EFCEs possess a sufficient amount of independence between subgames to perform resolving efficiently, and (iii) provide two algorithms for resolving, one using linear programming and the other based on regret minimization. Both methods guarantee \textit{safety}, i.e., they will never be counterproductive. Our methods are the first time an online method has been applied to the correlated, general-sum setting.