Wu Wenjun AI Science and Technology Award Honors Tsinghua and Ant Group's Unconstrained Human Portrait Perception and Understanding Technology

At the 2022 Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Award ceremony, a collaborative team from Tsinghua University and Ant Group's security laboratory received the first‑class Wu Wenjun AI Natural Science Award for their ten‑year project titled “Unconstrained Human Portrait Perception and Understanding”.

The Wu Wenjun AI Award, established by the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2011, is the nation’s highest honor in AI, with the Natural Science First‑Class Award reserved for pioneering, widely cited breakthroughs that drive the discipline forward.

The awarded project addresses the long‑standing challenges of human portrait detection and recognition under varying poses, expressions, lighting, and viewpoints. It delivers a comprehensive theoretical framework and core algorithms that achieve high‑precision AI portrait perception.

Three major scientific contributions were highlighted:

1. Identification of the importance of “invariant feature learning” for diverse portrait appearances, leading to a full‑viewpoint key‑information modeling framework.

2. Discovery of pervasive correlations among multi‑dimensional portrait attributes, resulting in a joint multi‑task and adversarial invariant learning method for attribute mining.

3. Construction of a highly adaptable machine‑vision framework for “face‑portrait‑crowd” scenarios, enabling multi‑attribute fusion perception in real‑world applications.

The technology has been integrated into Ant Group’s e‑KYC trusted identity authentication solution, serving over 120 million users across Southeast Asia, and has been adopted by companies such as Omron and Huawei.

Academic impact includes five major paper awards (e.g., CVPR, ACM Multimedia), ten championship titles in top portrait‑recognition contests, 8 representative papers with over 3,200 Google Scholar citations and 650 Web of Science citations, and endorsements from numerous leading scholars.

Ant Group’s security labs, comprising nine research centers, continue to focus on AI security, digital identity, intelligent risk control, data security, and network security, collaborating with top universities to advance frontier technologies.

The award underscores the significance of sustained research investment and signals ongoing commitment to building an integrated industry‑academia‑research ecosystem that strengthens digital security and supports the digital economy.