The past decade has witnessed the rapid development of feature representation learning and distance metric learning, whereas the two steps are often discussed separately. To explore their interaction, this work proposes an end-to-end learning framework called DARI, i.e. Distance metric And Representation Integration, and validates the effectiveness of DARI in the challenging task of person verification. Given the training images annotated with the labels, we first produce a large number of triplet units, and each one contains three images, i.e. one person and the matched mismatch references. For each triplet unit, the distance disparity between the matched pair and the mismatched pair tends to be maximized. We solve this objective by building a deep architecture of convolutional neural networks. In particular, the Mahalanobis distance matrix is naturally factorized as one top fully-connected layer that is seamlessly integrated with other bottom layers representing the image feature. The image feature and the distance metric can be thus simultaneously optimized via the one-shot backward propagation. On several public datasets, DARI shows very promising performance on re-identifying individuals cross cameras against various challenges, and outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.
@cite_4: Can machine learning deliver AI? Theoretical results, inspiration from the brain and cognition, as well as machine learning experiments suggest that in order to learn the kind of complicated functions that can represent high-level abstractions (e.g. in vision, language, and other AI-level tasks), one would need deep architectures. Deep architectures are composed of multiple levels of non-linear operations, such as in neural nets with many hidden layers, graphical models with many levels of latent variables, or in complicated propositional formulae re-using many sub-formulae. Each level of the architecture represents features at a different level of abstraction, defined as a composition of lower-level features. Searching the parameter space of deep architectures is a difficult task, but new algorithms have been discovered and a new sub-area has emerged in the machine learning community since 2006, following these discoveries. Learning algorithms such as those for Deep Belief Networks and other related unsupervised learning algorithms have recently been proposed to train deep architectures, yielding exciting results and beating the state-of-the-art in certain areas. Learning Deep Architectures for AI discusses the motivations for and principles of learning algorithms for deep architectures. By analyzing and comparing recent results with different learning algorithms for deep architectures, explanations for their success are proposed and discussed, highlighting challenges and suggesting avenues for future explorations in this area.
@cite_28: We study the problem of learning local metrics for nearest neighbor classification. Most previous works on local metric learning learn a number of local unrelated metrics. While this "independence" approach delivers an increased flexibility its downside is the considerable risk of overfitting. We present a new parametric local metric learning method in which we learn a smooth metric matrix function over the data manifold. Using an approximation error bound of the metric matrix function we learn local metrics as linear combinations of basis metrics defined on anchor points over different regions of the instance space. We constrain the metric matrix function by imposing on the linear combinations manifold regularization which makes the learned metric matrix function vary smoothly along the geodesics of the data manifold. Our metric learning method has excellent performance both in terms of predictive power and scalability. We experimented with several large-scale classification problems, tens of thousands of instances, and compared it with several state of the art metric learning methods, both global and local, as well as to SVM with automatic kernel selection, all of which it outperforms in a significant manner.
@cite_29: The accuracy of k-nearest neighbor (kNN) classification depends significantly on the metric used to compute distances between different examples. In this paper, we show how to learn a Mahalanobis distance metric for kNN classification from labeled examples. The Mahalanobis metric can equivalently be viewed as a global linear transformation of the input space that precedes kNN classification using Euclidean distances. In our approach, the metric is trained with the goal that the k-nearest neighbors always belong to the same class while examples from different classes are separated by a large margin. As in support vector machines (SVMs), the margin criterion leads to a convex optimization based on the hinge loss. Unlike learning in SVMs, however, our approach requires no modification or extension for problems in multiway (as opposed to binary) classification. In our framework, the Mahalanobis distance metric is obtained as the solution to a semidefinite program. On several data sets of varying size and difficulty, we find that metrics trained in this way lead to significant improvements in kNN classification. Sometimes these results can be further improved by clustering the training examples and learning an individual metric within each cluster. We show how to learn and combine these local metrics in a globally integrated manner.
@cite_3: Metric learning has become a very active research field. The most popular representative–Mahalanobis metric learning–can be seen as learning a linear transformation and then computing the Euclidean metric in the transformed space. Since a linear transformation might not always be appropriate for a given learning problem, kernelized versions of various metric learning algorithms exist. However, the problem then becomes finding the appropriate kernel function. Multiple kernel learning addresses this limitation by learning a linear combination of a number of predefined kernels; this approach can be also readily used in the context of multiple-source learning to fuse different data sources. Surprisingly, and despite the extensive work on multiple kernel learning for SVMs, there has been no work in the area of metric learning with multiple kernel learning. In this paper we fill this gap and present a general approach for metric learning with multiple kernel learning. Our approach can be instantiated with different metric learning algorithms provided that they satisfy some constraints. Experimental evidence suggests that our approach outperforms metric learning with an unweighted kernel combination and metric learning with cross-validation based kernel selection.
@cite_6: Learning application-specific distance metrics from labeled data is critical for both statistical classification and information retrieval. Most of the earlier work in this area has focused on finding metrics that simultaneously optimize compactness and separability in a global sense. Specifically, such distance metrics attempt to keep all of the data points in each class close together while ensuring that data points from different classes are separated. However, particularly when classes exhibit multimodal data distributions, these goals conflict and thus cannot be simultaneously satisfied. This paper proposes a Local Distance Metric (LDM) that aims to optimize local compactness and local separability. We present an efficient algorithm that employs eigenvector analysis, and bound optimization to learn the LDM from training data in a probabilistic framework. We demonstrate that LDM achieves significant improvements in both classification and retrieval accuracy compared to global distance learning and kernel-based KNN.
@cite_16: Metric learning makes it plausible to learn semantically meaningful distances for complex distributions of data using label or pairwise constraint information. However, to date, most metric learning methods are based on a single Mahalanobis metric, which cannot handle heterogeneous data well. Those that learn multiple metrics throughout the feature space have demonstrated superior accuracy, but at a severe cost to computational efficiency. Here, we adopt a new angle on the metric learning problem and learn a single metric that is able to implicitly adapt its distance function throughout the feature space. This metric adaptation is accomplished by using a random forest-based classifier to underpin the distance function and incorporate both absolute pairwise position and standard relative position into the representation. We have implemented and tested our method against state of the art global and multi-metric methods on a variety of data sets. Overall, the proposed method outperforms both types of method in terms of accuracy (consistently ranked first) and is an order of magnitude faster than state of the art multi-metric methods (16x faster in the worst case).
@cite_34: We consider the problem of learning a local metric in order to enhance the performance of nearest neighbor classification. Conventional metric learning methods attempt to separate data distributions in a purely discriminative manner; here we show how to take advantage of information from parametric generative models. We focus on the bias in the information-theoretic error arising from finite sampling effects, and find an appropriate local metric that maximally reduces the bias based upon knowledge from generative models. As a byproduct, the asymptotic theoretical analysis in this work relates metric learning to dimensionality reduction from a novel perspective, which was not understood from previous discriminative approaches. Empirical experiments show that this learned local metric enhances the discriminative nearest neighbor performance on various datasets using simple class conditional generative models such as a Gaussian.
A number of approaches, e.g., local metric learning and kernelized metric learning, have been suggested to learn multiple or nonlinear metrics from training data with complicated nonlinear manifold structure. In local metric learning, local metrics can be learned independently for each region or by considering the data manifold structure @cite_34 @cite_28 @cite_29 . In kernelized metric learning, a kernel function is exploited to implicitly embed instances into the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), and a Mahalanobis distance metric is then learned in the RKHS space @cite_3 . Actually, kernelized method with Gaussian RBF kernel can also be treated as local learning approach. As pointed out in @cite_4 , local learning are also shallow models, and generally are insufficient in coping with highly varying appearance and deformations of images. Another efficient local distance metric learning @cite_6 was also proposed for classification and retrieval. To handle heterogeneous data, @cite_16 propose a method using a random forest-based classifier to strengthen the distance function with implicit pairwise position dependence.