Face identification is the problem of determining whether two face images depict the same person or not. This is difficult due to variations in scale, pose, lighting, background, expression, hairstyle, and glasses. In this paper we present two methods for learning robust distance measures: (a) a logistic discriminant approach which learns the metric from a set of labelled image pairs (LDML) and (b) a nearest neighbour approach which computes the probability for two images to belong to the same class (MkNN). We evaluate our approaches on the Labeled Faces in the Wild data set, a large and very challenging data set of faces from Yahoo! News. The evaluation protocol for this data set defines a restricted setting, where a fixed set of positive and negative image pairs is given, as well as an unrestricted one, where faces are labelled by their identity. We are the first to present results for the unrestricted setting, and show that our methods benefit from this richer training data, much more so than the current state-of-the-art method. Our results of 79.3 % and 87.5 % correct for the restricted and unrestricted setting respectively, significantly improve over the current state-of-the-art result of 78.5%. Confidence scores obtained for face identification can be used for many applications e.g. clustering or recognition from a single training example. We show that our learned metrics also improve performance for these tasks. 1.

Abstract. Domain adaptation is an important emerging topic in computer vision. In this paper, we present one of the first studies of domain shift in the context of object recognition. We introduce a method that adapts object models acquired in a particular visual domain to new imaging conditions by learning a transformation that minimizes the effect of domain-induced changes in the feature distribution. The transformation is learned in a supervised manner and can be applied to categories for which there are no labeled examples in the new domain. While we focus our evaluation on object recognition tasks, the transform-based adaptation technique we develop is general and could be applied to non-image data. Another contribution is a new multi-domain object database, freely available for download. We experimentally demonstrate the ability of our method to improve recognition on categories with few or no target domain labels and moderate to large changes in the imaging conditions. 1

In this paper we study how to improve nearest neighbor classification by learning a Mahalanobis distance metric. We build on a recently proposed framework for distance metric learning known as large margin nearest neighbor (LMNN) classification. Our paper makes three contributions. First, we describe a highly efficient solver for the particular instance of semidefinite programming that arises in LMNN classification; our solver can handle problems with billions of large margin constraints in a few hours. Second, we show how to reduce both training and testing times using metric ball trees; the speedups from ball trees are further magnified by learning low dimensional representations of the input space. Third, we show how to learn different Mahalanobis distance metrics in different parts of the input space. For large data sets, the use of locally adaptive distance metrics leads to even lower error rates. 1.

Social media sites (e.g., Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook) are a popular distribution outlet for users looking to share their experiences and interests on the Web. These sites host substantial amounts of user-contributed materials (e.g., photographs, videos, and textual content) for a wide variety of real-world events of different type and scale. By automatically identifying these events and their associated user-contributed social media documents, which is the focus of this paper, we can enable event browsing and search in state-of-the-art search engines. To address this problem, we exploit the rich “context ” associated with social media content, including user-provided annotations (e.g., title, tags) and automatically generated information (e.g., content creation time). Using this rich context, which includes both textual and non-textual features, we can define appropriate document similarity metrics to enable online clustering of media to events. As a key contribution of this paper, we explore a variety of techniques for learning multi-feature similarity metrics for social media documents in a principled manner. We evaluate our techniques on large-scale, realworld datasets of event images from Flickr. Our evaluation results suggest that our approach identifies events, and their associated social media documents, more effectively than the state-of-the-art strategies on which we build.

Learning a measure of similarity between pairs of objects is an important generic problem in machine learning. It is particularly useful in large scale applications like searching for an image that is similar to a given image or finding videos that are relevant to a given video. In these tasks, users look for objects that are not only visually similar but also semantically related to a given object. Unfortunately, the approaches that exist today for learning such semantic similarity do not scale to large datasets. This is both because typically their CPU and storage requirements grow quadratically with the sample size, and because many methods impose complex positivity constraints on the space of learned similarity functions. The current paper presents OASIS, an Online Algorithm for Scalable Image Similarity learning that learns a bilinear similarity measure over sparse representations. OASIS is an online dual approach using the passive-aggressive family of learning algorithms with a large margin criterion and an efficient hinge loss cost. Our experiments show that OASIS is both fast and accurate at a wide range of scales: for a dataset with thousands of images, it achieves better results than existing state-of-the-art methods, while being an order of

In real-world applications, “what you saw ” during training is often not “what you get ” during deployment: the distribution and even the type and dimensionality of features can change from one dataset to the next. In this paper, we address the problem of visual domain adaptation for transferring object models from one dataset or visual domain to another. We introduce ARC-t, a flexible model for supervised learning of non-linear transformations between domains. Our method is based on a novel theoretical result demonstrating that such transformations can be learned in kernel space. Unlike existing work, our model is not restricted to symmetric transformations, nor to features of the same type and dimensionality, making it applicable to a significantly wider set of adaptation scenarios than previous methods. Furthermore, the method can be applied to categories that were not available during training. We demonstrate the ability of our method to adapt object recognition models under a variety of situations, such as differing imaging conditions, feature types and codebooks. 1.

Abstract. This paper proposes a metric learning based approach for human activity recognition with two main objectives: (1) reject unfamiliar activities and (2) learn with few examples. We show that our approach outperforms all state-of-the-art methods on numerous standard datasets for traditional action classification problem. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method not only can accurately label activities but also can reject unseen activities and can learn from few examples with high accuracy. We finally show that our approach works well on noisy YouTube videos. 1

In this paper, we study low-rank matrix nearness problems, with a focus on learning lowrank positive semidefinite (kernel) matrices for machine learning applications. We propose efficient algorithms that scale linearly in the number of data points and quadratically in the rank of the input matrix. Existing algorithms for learning kernel matrices often scale poorly, with running times that are cubic in the number of data points. We employ Bregman matrix divergences as the measures of nearness—these divergences are natural for learning low-rank kernels since they preserve rank as well as positive semidefiniteness. Special cases of our framework yield faster algorithms for various existing learning problems, and experimental results demonstrate that our algorithms can effectively learn both low-rank and full-rank kernel matrices.

Abstract—In graph-based learning models, entities are often represented as vertices in an undirected graph with weighted edges describing the relationships between entities. In many real-world applications, however, entities are often associated with relations of different types and/or from different sources, which can be well captured by multiple undirected graphs over the same set of vertices. How to exploit such multiple sources of information to make better inferences on entities remains an interesting open problem. In this paper, we focus on the problem of clustering the vertices based on multiple graphs in both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. As one of our contributions, we propose Linked Matrix Factorization (LMF) as a novel way of fusing information from multiple graph sources. In LMF, each graph is approximated by matrix factorization with a graph-specific factor and a factor common to all graphs, where the common factor provides features for all vertices. Experiments on SIAM journal data show that (1) we can improve the clustering accuracy through fusing multiple sources of information with several models, and (2) LMF yields superior or competitive results compared to other graph-based clustering methods. Keywords-clustering; multiple sources; graph; semisupervised learning I.

Matching people across non-overlapping camera views, known as person re-identification, is challenging due to the lack of spatial and temporal constraints and large visual appearance changes caused by variations in view angle, lighting, background clutter and occlusion. To address these challenges, most previous approaches aim to extract visual features that are both distinctive and stable under appearance changes. However, most visual features and their combinations under realistic conditions are neither stable nor distinctive thus should not be used indiscriminately. In this paper, we propose to formulate person re-identification as a distance learning problem, which aims to learn the optimal distance that can maximises matching accuracy regardless the choice of representation. To that end, we introduce a novel Probabilistic Relative Distance Comparison (PRDC) model, which differs from most existing distance learning methods in that, rather than minimising intra-class variation whilst maximising intra-class variation, it aims to maximise the probability of a pair of true match having a smaller distance than that of a wrong match pair. This makes our model more tolerant to appearance changes and less susceptible to model over-fitting. Extensive experiments are carried out to demonstrate that 1) by formulating the person re-identification problem as a distance learning problem, notable improvement on matching accuracy can be obtained against conventional person re-identification techniques, which is particularly significant when the training sample size is small; and 2) our PRDC outperforms not only existing distance learning methods but also alternative learning methods based on boosting and learning to rank. 1.