Recognising relevant objects or object states in its environment is a basic capability for an autonomous robot. The dominant approach to object recognition in images and range images is classification by supervised machine learning, nowadays mostly with deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). This works well for target classes whose variability can be completely covered with training examples. However, a robot moving in the wild, i.e., in an environment that is not known at the time the recognition system is trained, will often face : the training data cannot be assumed to exhaustively cover all the within-class variability that will be encountered in the test data. In that situation, learning is in principle possible, since the training set does capture the defining properties, respectively dissimilarities, of the target classes. But directly training a CNN to predict class probabilities is prone to overfitting to irrelevant correlations between the class labels and the specific subset of the target class that is represented in the training set. We explore the idea to instead learn a Siamese CNN that acts as similarity function between pairs of training examples. Class predictions are then obtained by measuring the similarities between a new test instance and the training samples. We show that the CNN embedding correctly recovers the relative similarities to arbitrary class exemplars in the training set. And that therefore few, randomly picked training exemplars are sufficient to achieve good predictions, making the procedure efficient.
@cite_10: The paper presents a new unsupervised dimensionality reduction technique, called parametric t-SNE, that learns a parametric mapping between the high-dimensional data space and the low-dimensional latent space. Parametric t-SNE learns the parametric mapping in such a way that the local structure of the data is preserved as well as possible in the latent space. We evaluate the performance of parametric t-SNE in experiments on three datasets, in which we compare it to the performance of two other unsupervised parametric dimensionality reduction techniques. The results of experiments illustrate the strong performance of parametric t-SNE, in particular, in learning settings in which the dimensionality of the latent space is relatively low.
@cite_9: Many areas of science depend on exploratory data analysis and visualization. The need to analyze large amounts of multivariate data raises the fundamental problem of dimensionality reduction: how to discover compact representations of high-dimensional data. Here, we introduce locally linear embedding (LLE), an unsupervised learning algorithm that computes low-dimensional, neighborhood-preserving embeddings of high-dimensional inputs. Unlike clustering methods for local dimensionality reduction, LLE maps its inputs into a single global coordinate system of lower dimensionality, and its optimizations do not involve local minima. By exploiting the local symmetries of linear reconstructions, LLE is able to learn the global structure of nonlinear manifolds, such as those generated by images of faces or documents of text. How do we judge similarity? Our mental representations of the world are formed by processing large numbers of sensory in
@cite_13: 
@cite_8: A new method for performing a nonlinear form of principal component analysis is proposed. By the use of integral operator kernel functions, one can efficiently compute principal components in high-dimensional feature spaces, related to input space by some nonlinear map—for instance, the space of all possible five-pixel products in 16 × 16 images. We give the derivation of the method and present experimental results on polynomial feature extraction for pattern recognition.
In their comprehensive survey @cite_13 , classify distance learning methods into three groups, unsupervised distance learning, supervised global distance learning, and supervised local distance learning. The idea of unsupervised methods is to learn a lower-dimensional embedding that preserves the pairwise distances between data points. Besides classical techniques like PCA and its non-linear generalisations (KPCA @cite_8 , LLE @cite_9 , etc.), unsupervised distance learning can also be implemented with neural networks, e.g., auto-encoders @cite_10 .