Critically Examining the "Neural Hype": Weak Baselines and the Additivity of Effectiveness Gains from Neural Ranking Models

Is neural IR mostly hype? In a recent SIGIR Forum article, Lin expressed skepticism that neural ranking models were actually improving ad hoc retrieval effectiveness in limited data scenarios. He provided anecdotal evidence that authors of neural IR papers demonstrate "wins" by comparing against weak baselines. This paper provides a rigorous evaluation of those claims in two ways: First, we conducted a meta-analysis of papers that have reported experimental results on the TREC Robust04 test collection. We do not find evidence of an upward trend in effectiveness over time. In fact, the best reported results are from a decade ago and no recent neural approach comes close. Second, we applied five recent neural models to rerank the strong baselines that Lin used to make his arguments. A significant improvement was observed for one of the models, demonstrating additivity in gains. While there appears to be merit to neural IR approaches, at least some of the gains reported in the literature appear illusory.Comment: Published in the Proceedings of the 42nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2019

Clothing Co-Parsing by Joint Image Segmentation and Labeling

This paper aims at developing an integrated system of clothing co-parsing, in order to jointly parse a set of clothing images (unsegmented but annotated with tags) into semantic configurations. We propose a data-driven framework consisting of two phases of inference. The first phase, referred as "image co-segmentation", iterates to extract consistent regions on images and jointly refines the regions over all images by employing the exemplar-SVM (E-SVM) technique [23]. In the second phase (i.e. "region co-labeling"), we construct a multi-image graphical model by taking the segmented regions as vertices, and incorporate several contexts of clothing configuration (e.g., item location and mutual interactions). The joint label assignment can be solved using the efficient Graph Cuts algorithm. In addition to evaluate our framework on the Fashionista dataset [30], we construct a dataset called CCP consisting of 2098 high-resolution street fashion photos to demonstrate the performance of our system. We achieve 90.29% / 88.23% segmentation accuracy and 65.52% / 63.89% recognition rate on the Fashionista and the CCP datasets, respectively, which are superior compared with state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, CVPR 201