The vast increase in amount and complexity of digital content led to a wide interest in ad-hoc retrieval systems in recent years. Complementary, the existence of heterogeneous data sources and retrieval models stimulated the proliferation of increasingly ingenious and effective rank aggregation functions. Although recently proposed rank aggregation functions are promising with respect to effectiveness, existing proposals in the area usually overlook efficiency aspects. We propose an innovative rank aggregation function that is unsupervised, intrinsically multimodal, and targeted for fast retrieval and top effectiveness performance. We introduce the concepts of embedding and indexing of graph-based rank-aggregation representation models, and their application for search tasks. Embedding formulations are also proposed for graph-based rank representations. We introduce the concept of fusion vectors, a late-fusion representation of objects based on ranks, from which an intrinsically rank-aggregation retrieval model is defined. Next, we present an approach for fast retrieval based on fusion vectors, thus promoting an efficient rank aggregation system. Our method presents top effectiveness performance among state-of-the-art related work, while bringing novel aspects of multimodality and effectiveness. Consistent speedups are achieved against the recent baselines in all datasets considered.
@cite_38: Recently two lines of image retrieval algorithms demonstrate excellent scalability: 1) local features indexed by a vocabulary tree, and 2) holistic features indexed by compact hashing codes. Although both of them are able to search visually similar imageseffectively, their retrieval precision may vary dramatically among queries. Therefore, combining these two types of methods is expected to further enhance the retrieval precision. However, the feature characteristics and the algorithmic procedures of these methods are dramatically different, which is very challenging for the feature-level fusion. This motivates us to investigate how to fuse the ordered retrieval sets, i.e., the ranks of images, given by multiple retrieval methods, to boost the retrieval precision without sacrificing theirscalability. In this paper, we model retrieval ranks as graphs of candidate images and propose a graph-based query specific fusion approach, where multiple graphs are merged and reranked by conducting a link analysis on a fused graph. The retrieval quality of an individual method is measured on-the-fly by assessing the consistency of the top candidates’ nearest neighborhoods. Hence, it iscapable of adaptively integrating the strengths of the retrieval methods using local or holistic features for different query images. This proposed method does not need any supervision, has few parameters, and is easy to implement. Extensive and thorough experiments have been conducted on four public datasets, i.e., the UKbench , Corel-5K , Holidays and the large-scale San Francisco Landmarks datasets. Our proposed method has achieved very competitive performance, including state-of-the-art results on several data sets, e.g., the N-S score 3.83 for UKbench .
@cite_8: Abstract Performing effective image retrieval tasks, capable of exploiting the underlying structure of datasets still constitutes a challenge research scenario. This paper proposes a novel manifold learning approach that exploits the intrinsic dataset geometry for improving the effectiveness of image retrieval tasks. The underlying dataset manifold is modeled and analyzed in terms of a Reciprocal kNN Graph and its Connected Components. The method computes the new retrieval results on an unsupervised way, without the need of any user intervention. A large experimental evaluation was conducted, considering different image retrieval tasks, various datasets and features. The proposed method yields better effectiveness results than various methods recently proposed, achieving effectiveness gains up to +40.75 .
@cite_56: Abstract This paper presents a robust and comprehensive graph-based rank aggregation approach, used to combine results of isolated ranker models in retrieval tasks. The method follows an unsupervised scheme, which is independent of how the isolated ranks are formulated. Our approach is able to combine arbitrary models, defined in terms of different ranking criteria, such as those based on textual, image or hybrid content representations. We reformulate the ad-hoc retrieval problem as a document retrieval based on fusion graphs , which we propose as a new unified representation model capable of merging multiple ranks and expressing inter-relationships of retrieval results automatically. By doing so, we claim that the retrieval system can benefit from learning the manifold structure of datasets, thus leading to more effective results. Another contribution is that our graph-based aggregation formulation, unlike existing approaches, allows for encapsulating contextual information encoded from multiple ranks, which can be directly used for ranking, without further computations and post-processing steps over the graphs. Based on the graphs, a novel similarity retrieval score is formulated using an efficient computation of minimum common subgraphs. Finally, another benefit over existing approaches is the absence of hyperparameters. A comprehensive experimental evaluation was conducted considering diverse well-known public datasets, composed of textual, image, and multimodal documents. Performed experiments demonstrate that our method reaches top performance, yielding better effectiveness scores than state-of-the-art baseline methods and promoting large gains over the rankers being fused, thus demonstrating the successful capability of the proposal in representing queries based on a unified graph-based model of rank fusions.
@cite_43: Effectively measuring the similarity among images is a challenging problem in image retrieval tasks due to the difficulty of considering the dataset manifold. This paper presents an unsupervised manifold learning algorithm that takes into account the intrinsic dataset geometry for defining a more effective distance among images. The dataset structure is modeled in terms of a Correlation Graph (CG) and analyzed using Strongly Connected Components (SCCs). While the Correlation Graph adjacency provides a precise but strict similarity relationship, the Strongly Connected Components analysis expands these relationships considering the dataset geometry. A large and rigorous experimental evaluation protocol was conducted for different image retrieval tasks. The experiments were conducted in different datasets involving various image descriptors. Results demonstrate that the manifold learning algorithm can significantly improve the effectiveness of image retrieval systems. The presented approach yields better results in terms of effectiveness than various methods recently proposed in the literature.
@cite_27: A graph-based representation for ranked lists considering only top positions.An efficient rank-based approach for distance learning in shape retrieval tasks.Descriptor combination considering different shape features.Comparable or superior effectiveness scores when compared with state-of-the-art approaches. Several re-ranking algorithms have been proposed recently. Some effective approaches are based on complex graph-based diffusion processes, which usually are time consuming and therefore inappropriate for real-world large scale shape collections. In this paper, we introduce a novel graph-based approach for iterative distance learning in shape retrieval tasks. The proposed method is based on the combination of graphs defined in terms of multiple ranked lists. The efficiency of the method is guaranteed by the use of only top positions of ranked lists in the definition of graphs that encode reciprocal references. Effectiveness analysis performed in three widely used shape datasets demonstrate that the proposed graph-based ranked-list model yields significant gains (up to +55.52 ) when compared with the use of shape descriptors in isolation. Furthermore, the proposed method also yields comparable or superior effectiveness scores when compared with several state-of-the-art approaches.
@cite_68: The problem of combining the ranked preferences of many experts is an old and surprisingly deep problem that has gained renewed importance in many machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval applications. Effective rank aggregation becomes difficult in real-world situations in which the rankings are noisy, incomplete, or even disjoint. We address these difficulties by extending several standard methods of rank aggregation to consider similarity between items in the various ranked lists, in addition to their rankings. The intuition is that similar items should receive similar rankings, given an appropriate measure of similarity for the domain of interest. In this paper, we propose several algorithms for merging ranked lists of items with defined similarity. We establish evaluation criteria for these algorithms by extending previous definitions of distance between ranked lists to include the role of similarity between items. Finally, we test these new methods on both synthetic and real-world data, including data from an application in
Existing graph-based methods are mostly targeted at modelling the whole collection of objects as a graph, from which the ranks can be derived @cite_8 @cite_38 @cite_43 @cite_68 @cite_27 . Among these graph-based methods, a state-of-the-art unsupervised rank aggregation approach has been proposed recently, based on graph-based rank aggregation representations followed by similarity computations over those structures @cite_56 . This initiative -- referred to here as -- was novel in establishing an aggregation representation, and overcame most previous baselines in retrieval effectiveness. Its shortcoming, as in other previous works, is about the retrieval performance, as the query retrieval times are asymptotic linear to the collection size. In this paper, we adopt as our main baseline, for effectiveness and efficiency comparative analysis.