Ray Anyi Rao

Ph.D. Candidate, Multimedia Laboratory
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong, China
Email: anyirao [at] ie.cuhk.edu.hk

Short Bio

Ray Anyi Rao is a Ph.D. candidate at MMLab in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, advised by Dahua Lin and Bolei Zhou. He got the B.S. from EE Department, Nanjing University in 2018, ranking 1/183. He studies human-centric AI for multimodality and creativity, with focuses on intelligent video editing and creation, video semantic and cinematic analysis, aiming to build connections between AI and humans for collaborative intelligence.

News

2021-07: We are organizing The First Workshop on AI for Creative Video Editing and Understanding during ICCV 2021. Researchers, artists and entrepreneurs from academia (Stanford, Berkeley), industry (Adobe, Netflix, Facebook, Tencent) and more, are going to share and sparkle their ideas together! Please follow our Twitter for more information!

2021-07: One paper is accepted to ICCV 2021.

2021-06: One paper is accepted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.

2021-05: Our CVPR 2020 work SceneSeg is set as the baseline for the 2021 Tencent Advertising Algorithm Competition and ACM Multimedia 2021 Grand Challenge Track 1 Video Ads Content Structuring. Come to join and win USD$100,000 for the first prize.

2020-07: MovieNet is online with an easy-to-use toolkit and a detailed tutorial as a part of OpenMMLab.

2020-07: Three papers are accepted to ECCV 2020.

2020-02: One paper is accepted to CVPR 2020. Also appears at LUV 2020 (15-min talk) and Sight and Sound 2020 (5-min talk).

2020-01: HotFlip is included in AllenNLP and TextAttack

Publication

A Unified Framework for Shot Type Classification Based on Subject Centric Lens
Anyi Rao, Jiaze Wang, Linning Xu, Xuekun Jiang, Qingqiu Huang, Bolei Zhou, Dahua Lin
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020
Also appears at Video Turing Test 2020 (5-min talk)
[Paper] [Webpage]

MovieNet: A Holistic Dataset for Movie Understanding
Qingqiu Huang, Yu Xiong, Anyi Rao, Jiaze Wang, Dahua Lin
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Spotlight)
[Paper] [Webpage] [Supplements] [Code]

CityNeRF: Building NeRF at City Scale
Yuanbo Xiangli*, Linning Xu*, Xingang Pan, Nanxuan Zhao, Anyi Rao, Christian Theobalt, Bo Dai, Dahua Lin
In arXiv, 2021
[Paper] [Webpage] [Supplements] [CitySuper]

BlockPlanner: City Block Generation with Vectorized Graph Representation
Linning Xu*, Yuanbo Xiangli*, Anyi Rao, Nanxuan Zhao, Bo Dai, Ziwei Liu, Dahua Lin
IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021
[Paper] [Webpage] [Supplements]

A Local-to-Global Approach to Multi-modal Movie Scene Segmentation
Anyi Rao, Linning Xu, Yu Xiong, Guodong Xu, Qingqiu Huang, Bolei Zhou, Dahua Lin
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020
Also appears at LUV 2020 (15-min talk) and Sight and Sound 2020 (5-min talk)
[Paper] [Webpage] [Code]

Online Multi-modal Person Search in Videos
Jiayue Xia, Anyi Rao⁺(corresponding), Linning Xu, Qingqiu Huang, Dahua Lin
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020
[Paper] [Webpage]

Jointly Learning the Attributes and Composition of Shots for Boundary Detection in Videos
Xuekun Jiang, Libiao Jin, Anyi Rao⁺(corresponding), Linning Xu, Dahua Lin
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, (TMM), 2021
[Paper]

HotFlip: White-Box Adversarial Examples for Text Classification
Javid Ebrahimi, Anyi Rao, Daniel Lowd, Dejing Dou
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2018
It is included in several open-source NLP research libraries AllenNLP, TextAttack and OpenAttack
[Paper] [Poster] [AllenNLP] [OpenAttack] [Code]

Automatic Music Accompaniment
Anyi Rao, Francis Lau
In arXiv, 2018
[Paper] [Presentation] [Code]

Experience

Research Intern at Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Research Intern at SenseTime Research

Visitor at the University of Toronto and Vector Institute

Research Assistant at the Advanced Integration and Mining Lab, Eugene, OR, USA

Research Intern at University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R.

Awards

Hong Kong PhD Fellowship	2018
Most Influential Paper by Paper Digest	2021
National Scholarship awarded by the China Ministry of Education, the highest honor in China	2015
Provincial Merit Student awarded by the Jiangsu Government, the highest honor in the province	2017
Nanjing University Top-Grade Scholarship, the highest honor in the university	2018
SenseTime Scholarship, awarded to 30 students out of all AI major undergraduate students in China	2017
Gold Medal in Invitational National Mathematical Olympiad	2013

Nanjing University Outstanding Student Leader Award	2015
Nanjing University Outstanding Student Award	2016
Nanjing University Top Volunteer Excellence Award	2015
Zhenggang Scholarship, top 40 students in Nanjing University	2016
Zhenggang Jingying Scholarship	2017
Nanjing University People Scholarship	2016
Nanjing University People Scholarship	2017
World ranking 32nd in 2016 Calculus World Cup	2016
Meritorious winner prize in the 2016 National Mathematical Contest in Modeling	2016
Best paper in the 2014 University Electronics Design Contest	2014

Early Stage Research and Academic

Click to expand

Early Stage Research

Multi-modal Video Analysis and Understanding
August. 2018 - Present MMLab, Hong Kong S.A.R.
Advisor: Prof. Dahua Lin (Director) and Prof. Bolei Zhou (Innovators Under 35)

Cinematic style analysis in videos, published one ECCV20.

Multi-modal story and plot understanding in movies, published one ECCV20.

Scene understanding in movies, published one ECCV20 and one CVPR20.

Robust Training with Word-level Adversity for NLP
Sept. 2017 - April. 2018 Advanced Integration and Mining Lab (AIM), Eugene, OR, United States of America
Advisor: Prof. Dejing Dou (Director, Head of Baidu Big Data Lab) and Prof. Daniel Lowd (Director of Graduate Studies)

Proposed an efficient word-level gradient-based adversarial examples generation approach for training robust models.

Evaluated the method across a wide range of sentence-level classification tasks and the method using adversarial training achieved excellent performances on benchmarks.

This work on Adversarial examples for NLP was featured in an article in The Register.

Undergrad Academic

His GPA ranked No.1 in each semester during his undergraduate studies at Nanjing University with an overall GPA: 3.96/4.00 and Rank: 1/183. He finished major curricula in 2 years and learned a bunch of online courses. [Whole]

Undergrad Research Beginning

Automatic Music Accompaniment Using Probabilistic Machine Learning
Jul. 2017 - Aug. 2017 The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R.
Advisor: Prof. Francis Lau (Associate Dean)

Proposed a fast decoding algorithm to deal with performance errors and reduce computational complexity from O(n²) to O(n). It is able to work in real-time with practical length scores.

Constructed a comprehensive system and developed a parallel Hidden Markov Model for score following.

Developed a new free open-source Windows-based automatic music follower and accompanist.

Real-time 3D Surface Reconstruction Using Lidar (Light Detection And Ranging)
Aug. 2016 - Sept. 2017 Visual Sensing and Graphics Lab (VISG Lab), Nanjing University
Supervisor: Prof. Sidan Du (Director)

Proposed a novel line of sight algorithm to real-time reconstruct surface and achieved state-of-the-art results.

Employed a new surface lattice data structure in implicit surface update for memory efficiency.

Presented a real-time 3D reconstruction pipeline for large-scale Lidar point clouds.

Implemented parallel computation to update the implicit surface faster and Motion Estimation and Mapping to register point clouds. [Report] [Video]

Undergrad Course Projects

Computer Vision: 3D Human Poses Estimation from a Single Image [Presentation] Reduced the ambiguities in the 3D pose estimation using sparse coding and applied human-portion constraints to acquire a minimization problem.

Convex Optimization: Road Car Flow Prediction [Report] Predicted car motion under road circumstances constraints using Markov Decision Process and OD estimated matrix, and improved the performance according to different traffic loads and vehicle types.

Probability and Stochastic Process: Monte Carlo for Multidimensional Integrals [Report]

Machine Learning: Spam Filtering System Construction

Microcomputers and Interface Techniques: x86 Assembly Language Programming [Report]

Signal Processing: Single-Photon Detector Design [Report] [Presentation] Designed a 64-channel low-noise pre-amplifier using a symmetric structure with 100 times less noise, and drew its 8-layers circuit board.

Volunteer and Leadership Experience

Click to expand

Co-Founder of a Children Care Volunteer Program Sep. 2015 - Dec. 2015
Co-founded a psychological consulting program to promote left-behind children's growth and education. Volunteered to teach left-behind children Math and English in a junior high school located in the remote, underdeveloped Xiushui county. Recognized as a key team leader in the successful Warm One Hundred Campaign, which raised money for left-behind children. Our group received an excellence award from the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation.

Vice President of a Young Volunteers Association at Nanjing University Jun. 2015 - Jun. 2016
Organized and participated in over 100 out-of-school and 20 in-school activities covering over 1000 volunteers. Our association received a volunteer association excellence award.

Research Intern Group Leader of JCET [Media Report] July. 2015 - Aug. 2015

Campus Ambassador of Huawei Aug. 2017 - Dec. 2017

Student Volunteer of International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Dec. 2019

Miscellaneous

Professional Activities
Co-organizer: ICCV 2021 Workshop on AI for Creative Video Editing and Understanding
Program Committee Member: CVPR, ICCV, AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR
Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
Judge: The 3rd International Artificial Intelligence Fair

Teaching Experience
Head TA, IERG 4160, Image and Video Processing (graduate level), Fall 2019
TA, IERG 3180, Microcontrollers and Embedded Systems Laboratory, Spring 2020

Patents
A Video Editing Method, CN202010694551.1
A Video Classification Method, CN202010694811.1
An Image Processing Method and Related Products, CN202010450801.3
A Zero-shot Action Recognition Method, CN202110821209.4
A Layout Generation Method, CN202111128490.X

Hobbies
Love: 🌊🥥🏄‍♂️✈️🎬
Travel: 🇨🇳🇭🇰🇺🇸🇯🇵🇲🇴🇬🇧🇸🇬🇰🇷🇦🇪🇳🇱🇧🇪🇩🇪🇫🇷
Undergrad: Nanjing University Student Choir Member (Joyful Snowflakes written by Chih-mo Hsu), The NJU EE Department Young Volunteers Association Vice President, Bronze medal at Nanjing University 55th Sports Meeting
Language: A bit of Japanese and Cantonese, Native Mandarin, Full proficiency in English