1. A method implemented by a computer comprising at least one processor for ranking images with respect to query attributes, the method comprising: in response to a query comprising a plurality of specified facial attributes that are each discernable from face image data, estimating locations of a plurality of facial regions that are each relevant to different ones of the specified facial attributes, and wherein the plurality of facial regions are distinct and different from each other; extracting a plurality of different features from the estimated facial regions of each of a plurality of database facial images; ranking the database facial images in base layer rankings for different ones of the extracted features and the plurality of attributes as a function of matching feature vectors in a bipartite graph to a base layer ranking sequence, wherein the feature vectors are each a relevance of the plurality of different features extracted from one of the images to one of the attributes relevant to one of the estimated regions; ranking the database facial images in second-layer rankings as a function of defining each of a plurality of multi-dimensional second-layer attribute vectors as bilinear combinations of one of the feature vectors and its associated base layer parameter vector from each of the base-layer rankings for a common one of the attributes, and matching the multi-dimensional second-layer attribute vectors in a bipartite graph to the second-layer ranking sequence; and ranking the images for relevance to the query as a function of the second-layer rankings.