No Arabic abstract
We build a large-scale visual search system which finds similar product images given a fashion item. Defining similarity among arbitrary fashion-products is still remains a challenging problem, even there is no exact ground-truth. To resolve this problem, we define more than 90 fashion-related attributes, and combination of these attributes can represent thousands of unique fashion-styles. The fashion-attributes are one of the ingredients to define semantic similarity among fashion-product images. To build our system at scale, these fashion-attributes are again used to build an inverted indexing scheme. In addition to these fashion-attributes for semantic similarity, we extract colour and appearance features in a region-of-interest (ROI) of a fashion item for visual similarity. By sharing our approach, we expect active discussion on that how to apply current computer vision research into the e-commerce industry.
This paper introduces the large scale visual search algorithm and system infrastructure at Alibaba. The following challenges are discussed under the E-commercial circumstance at Alibaba (a) how to handle heterogeneous image data and bridge the gap between real-shot images from user query and the online images. (b) how to deal with large scale indexing for massive updating data. (c) how to train deep models for effective feature representation without huge human annotations. (d) how to improve the user engagement by considering the quality of the content. We take advantage of large image collection of Alibaba and state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to perform visual search at scale. We present solutions and implementation details to overcome those problems and also share our learnings from building such a large scale commercial visual search engine. Specifically, model and search-based fusion approach is introduced to effectively predict categories. Also, we propose a deep CNN model for joint detection and feature learning by mining user click behavior. The binary index engine is designed to scale up indexing without compromising recall and precision. Finally, we apply all the stages into an end-to-end system architecture, which can simultaneously achieve highly efficient and scalable performance adapting to real-shot images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advancement of each module in our system. We hope visual search at Alibaba becomes more widely incorporated into todays commercial applications.
We consider the problem of complementary fashion prediction. Existing approaches focus on learning an embedding space where fashion items from different categories that are visually compatible are closer to each other. However, creating such labeled outfits is intensive and also not feasible to generate all possible outfit combinations, especially with large fashion catalogs. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised learning approach where we leverage large unlabeled fashion corpus to create pseudo-positive and pseudo-negative outfits on the fly during training. For each labeled outfit in a training batch, we obtain a pseudo-outfit by matching each item in the labeled outfit with unlabeled items. Additionally, we introduce consistency regularization to ensure that representation of the original images and their transformations are consistent to implicitly incorporate colour and other important attributes through self-supervision. We conduct extensive experiments on Polyvore, Polyvore-D and our newly created large-scale Fashion Outfits datasets, and show that our approach with only a fraction of labeled examples performs on-par with completely supervised methods.
Typical e-commerce platforms contain millions of products in the catalog. Users visit these platforms and enter search queries to retrieve their desired products. Therefore, showing the relevant products at the top is essential for the success of e-commerce platforms. We approach this problem by learning low dimension representations for queries and product descriptions by leveraging user click-stream data as our main source of signal for product relevance. Starting from GRU-based architectures as our baseline model, we move towards a more advanced transformer-based architecture. This helps the model to learn contextual representations of queries and products to serve better search results and understand the user intent in an efficient manner. We perform experiments related to pre-training of the Transformer based RoBERTa model using a fashion corpus and fine-tuning it over the triplet loss. Our experiments on the product ranking task show that the RoBERTa model is able to give an improvement of 7.8% in Mean Reciprocal Rank(MRR), 15.8% in Mean Average Precision(MAP) and 8.8% in Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain(NDCG), thus outperforming our GRU based baselines. For the product retrieval task, RoBERTa model is able to outperform other two models with an improvement of 164.7% in Precision@50 and 145.3% in Recall@50. In order to highlight the importance of pre-training RoBERTa for fashion domain, we qualitatively compare already pre-trained RoBERTa on standard datasets with our custom pre-trained RoBERTa over a fashion corpus for the query token prediction task. Finally, we also show a qualitative comparison between GRU and RoBERTa results for product retrieval task for some test queries.
In this paper, we propose a multimodal search engine that combines visual and textual cues to retrieve items from a multimedia database aesthetically similar to the query. The goal of our engine is to enable intuitive retrieval of fashion merchandise such as clothes or furniture. Existing search engines treat textual input only as an additional source of information about the query image and do not correspond to the real-life scenario where the user looks for the same shirt but of denim. Our novel method, dubbed DeepStyle, mitigates those shortcomings by using a joint neural network architecture to model contextual dependencies between features of different modalities. We prove the robustness of this approach on two different challenging datasets of fashion items and furniture where our DeepStyle engine outperforms baseline methods by 18-21% on the tested datasets. Our search engine is commercially deployed and available through a Web-based application.
We tackle the problem of visual search under resource constraints. Existing systems use the same embedding model to compute representations (embeddings) for the query and gallery images. Such systems inherently face a hard accuracy-efficiency trade-off: the embedding model needs to be large enough to ensure high accuracy, yet small enough to enable query-embedding computation on resource-constrained platforms. This trade-off could be mitigated if gallery embeddings are generated from a large model and query embeddings are extracted using a compact model. The key to building such a system is to ensure representation compatibility between the query and gallery models. In this paper, we address two forms of compatibility: One enforced by modifying the parameters of each model that computes the embeddings. The other by modifying the architectures that compute the embeddings, leading to compatibility-aware neural architecture search (CMP-NAS). We test CMP-NAS on challenging retrieval tasks for fashion images (DeepFashion2), and face images (IJB-C). Compared to ordinary (homogeneous) visual search using the largest embedding model (paragon), CMP-NAS achieves 80-fold and 23-fold cost reduction while maintaining accuracy within 0.3% and 1.6% of the paragon on DeepFashion2 and IJB-C respectively.