The low storage and strong representation capabilities of hash codes for image retrieval has made hashing technologies very popular. Several existing deep hashing methods focus on the task of general image retrieval, while neglecting the task of fine-grained image retrieval. Recently, some fine-grained hashing methods have been proposed to capture the subtle differences, which mainly utilize the single-modality visual features to solve the discriminative region localization while ignoring the semantic information. In this paper, we propose a correlation filtering hashing (CFH) method to learn discrete binary codes, which can adequately take advantage of the cross-modal correlation between the semantic information and the visual features for discriminative region localization. Specifically, we utilize a feature pyramid network to learn multi-level visual features. Subsequently, the label vector is embedded into the visual space, which can be used as a correlation filter on the feature maps to capture the latent location of objects. Finally, we perform global average pooling over the output maps and concatenate the features of different levels to produce the hash codes of query images. Extensive experiments on two fine-grained datasets show that the proposed CFH outperforms the state-of-the-art hashing methods.

In the field of computer vision, fine-grained image retrieval is an extremely challenging task due to the inherently subtle intra-class object variations. In addition, the high-dimensional real-valued features extracted from large-scale fine-grained image datasets slow the retrieval speed and increase the storage cost. To solve above issues, existing fine-grained image retrieval methods mainly focus on finding more discriminative local regions for generating discriminative and compact hash codes, which achieve limited fine-grained image retrieval performance due to the large quantization errors and the confounding granularities and context of discriminative parts, i.e., the correct recognition of fine-grained objects mainly attribute to the discriminative parts and their context. To learn robust causal features and reduce the quantization errors, we propose a deep progressive asymmetric quantization (DPAQ) method based on causal intervention to learn compact and robust descriptions for fine-grained image retrieval task. Specifically, we introduce a structural causal model to learn robust casual features via causal intervention for fine-grained visual recognition. Subsequently, we design a progressive asymmetric quantization layer in the feature embedding space, which can preserve the semantic information and reduce the quantization errors sufficiently. Finally, we incorporate both the fine-grained image classification and retrieval tasks into an end-to-end deep learning architecture for generating robust and compact descriptions. Experimental results on several fine-grained image retrieval datasets demonstrate that the proposed DPAQ method performs the best for fine-grained image retrieval task and surpasses the state-of-the art fine-grained hashing methods by a large margin.

The question answering system in open domain enables a machine to automatically select and generate the answer for questions posed by humans in a natural language form on the website. Previous approaches seek effective ways of extracting the semantic features between question and answer, but the contextual information effects in semantic matching are still limited by short-term memory. As an alternative, we propose an internal knowledge-based end-to-end model, enhanced by an attentive memory network for both answer selection and answer generation tasks by considering the full advantages of the semantics and multifacts (i.e., timescales, topics, and context). In detail, we design a long-term memory to learn the top- $k$ fine-grained similarity representations, where two memory-aware mechanisms aggregate the series of semantic word-level and sentence-level similarities to support the coarse contextual information. Furthermore, we propose a novel memory refinement mechanism with the two-dimensional of writing heads that offer an efficient approach to multiview selection of the salient word pairs. In the training stage, we adopt the transformer-based transfer learning skill to effectively pretrain the model. Experimentally, we compare the state-of-the-art approaches on four public datasets, the experimental results show that the proposed model achieves competitive performance.

In the era of emotional consumption, it has become a hot topic that commodities meet consumers’ emotional needs. As a necessity of life, the car also needs to meet the needs of consumers. To achieve that consumers can purchase cars according to their emotional needs, we need to label cars with emotional words. The car’s appearance is the crucial medium of emotional information transmission, especially the car’s color is an essential emotional factor. As the first impression of products, color affects people’s emotional attitude. Therefore, introducing color features into the training process of sample marking is an excellent idea for intelligent labeling of a large number of product emotions. This paper proposes a semi‐supervised learning method, Color‐SSL, based on color data augmentation to realize the label of car emotion. Color‐SSL takes FlexMatch as the framework of a semi‐supervised learning model and augments data by extracting subject color. Compared with the baseline method, the accuracy of this method improved by 3.2%, 8.3%, 8.6%, and 1.4% with 10, 50, 100, and 200 training samples and 1000 test samples. The results show that Color‐SSL obtains the best emotion‐label result (94%). In addition, this study publishes pictures of emotional car datasets with high resolution, orthogonal perspective, and uniform background.

The semantic matching problem consists of recognizing if the candidate text is relevant to a particular input text. Semantic similarities can be determined from human-curated knowledge, but such knowledge may not be available in every language. Instead, statistical learning techniques have been applied, but these techniques circumvent the need for manual feature engineering by using large datasets to train models to perform semantic similarity scoring between portions of text or words. The pre-trained transformer provides a further mechanism to consolidate the information throughout a sentence into single sentence-level representations, but these representations may not be optimal for the matching task. As an alternative, we propose an interactive semantic transformer based on a greedy layer-wise framework to learn a distributed similarity representation for sentence pairs. The novelty of the architecture lies in an abstract representation of the semantic similarities created by three-stage learning strategies. Model training is accomplished through a greedy layer-wise training scheme, that incorporates both supervised and unsupervised learning. The proposed model is experimentally compared to state-of-the-art approaches on three different dataset types: the library TREC, the Yahoo!, and Stack Exchange community question datasets, and results show the proposed model outperforming other approaches.

High-dimensional data are more sparsely distributed in space compared to low-dimensional data of the same size (e.g., 3D point cloud vs 2D images), a phenomenon known as the “Curse of Dimensionality” (COD). Consequently, more samples are required to effectively fine-tune models for high dimensional tasks like 3D point cloud understanding, leading to increased computational costs. Meanwhile, although 3D point clouds provide comprehensive spatial details, 2D images projected from specific viewpoints often capture sufficient information for understanding visual content. To address the COD challenge and leverage the complementary nature of 3D-2D data, we introduce a multi-modal, training-free approach named PointTFAm, an extended version of our original PointTFA. This new approach incorporates 2D view images projected from 3D point clouds in training-free manner to augment cloud classification. Specifically, PointTFAm contains two training-free branches that process 3D point clouds and 2D view images independently. Each branch includes its own Representative Memory Cache (RMC), Cloud/Image Query Refactor (CQR or IQR), and Training-Free Adapter (TFA). The model combines the outputs from both branches through score fusion to make effective multi-modal predictions. PointTFAm improves upon single-modal PointTFA by accuracy gains of 1.01%, 1.32%, and 4.64% on the Mod elNet40, ModelNet10, and ScanObjectNN benchmarks, respectively, setting new state-of-the-art performance for training-free point cloud understanding approaches.