Distance metric learning (DML) aims to find an appropriate way to reveal the underlying data relationship. It is critical in many machine learning, pattern recognition and data mining algorithms, and usually require large amount of label information (such as class labels or pair triplet constraints) to achieve satisfactory performance. However, the label information may be insufficient in real-world applications due to the high-labeling cost, and DML may fail in this case. Transfer metric learning (TML) is able to mitigate this issue for DML in the domain of interest (target domain) by leveraging knowledge information from other related domains (source domains). Although achieved a certain level of development, TML has limited success in various aspects such as selective transfer, theoretical understanding, handling complex data, big data and extreme cases. In this survey, we present a systematic review of the TML literature. In particular, we group TML into different categories according to different settings and metric transfer strategies, such as direct metric approximation, subspace approximation, distance approximation, and distribution approximation. A summarization and insightful discussion of the various TML approaches and their applications will be presented. Finally, we indicate some challenges and provide possible future directions.
TML is quite related to transfer subspace learning (TSL) @cite_26 @cite_111 or transfer feature learning (TFL) @cite_19 . An early work on TSL is presented in @cite_26 that finds a low-dimensional latent space, where the distribution difference between the source and target domain is minimized. This algorithm is conducted in a transductive manner and not convenient to derive a representation for new samples. This issue is tackled by @cite_41 , where a generic regularization framework is proposed for TSL based on Bregman divergence @cite_60 . A low-rank TSL (LTSL) framework is proposed in @cite_125 @cite_113 , where the subspace is found by reconstructing the projected target data using the projected source data under the low-rank representation @cite_88 @cite_43 theme. The main advantage of the framework is that only relevant source data are utilized to find the subspace and noisy information can be filtered out. That is, it can avoid negative transfer. The framework is further extended in @cite_67 to help recover missing modality in the target domain and improved in @cite_63 by exploiting both low-rank and sparse structures on the reconstruction matrix.
@cite_67 @cite_26 @cite_60 @cite_41 @cite_125 @cite_113 @cite_19 @cite_43 @cite_63 @cite_88 @cite_111
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Subspace learning and reconstruction have been widely explored in recent transfer learning work and generally a specially designed projection and reconstruction transfer matrix are wanted. However, existing subspace reconstruction based algorithms neglect the class prior such that the learned transfer function is biased, especially when data scarcity of some class is encountered. Different from those previous methods, in this paper, we propose a novel reconstruction-based transfer learning method called Class-specific Reconstruction Transfer Learning (CRTL), which optimizes a well-designed transfer loss function without class bias. Using a class-specific reconstruction matrix to align the source domain with the target domain which provides help for classification with class prior modeling. Furthermore, to keep the intrinsic relationship between data and labels after feature augmentation, a projected Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (pHSIC), that measures the dependency between two sets, is first proposed by mapping the data from original space to RKHS in transfer learning. In addition, combining low-rank and sparse constraints on the class-specific reconstruction coefficient matrix, the global and local data structures can be effectively preserved. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional representation-based domain adaptation methods. We propose a novel reconstruction-based transfer learning method called latent sparse domain transfer (LSDT) for domain adaptation and visual categorization of heterogeneous data. For handling cross-domain distribution mismatch, we advocate reconstructing the target domain data with the combined source and target domain data points based on @math -norm sparse coding. Furthermore, we propose a joint learning model for simultaneous optimization of the sparse coding and the optimal subspace representation. In addition, we generalize the proposed LSDT model into a kernel-based linear nonlinear basis transformation learning framework for tackling nonlinear subspace shifts in reproduced kernel Hilbert space. The proposed methods have three advantages: 1) the latent space and the reconstruction are jointly learned for pursuit of an optimal subspace transfer; 2) with the theory of sparse subspace clustering, a few valuable source and target data points are formulated to reconstruct the target data with noise (outliers) from source domain removed during domain adaptation, such that the robustness is guaranteed; and 3) a nonlinear projection of some latent space with kernel is easily generalized for dealing with highly nonlinear domain shift (e.g., face poses). Extensive experiments on several benchmark vision data sets demonstrate that the proposed approaches outperform other state-of-the-art representation-based domain adaptation methods. In this paper, we address the problem of unsupervised domain transfer learning in which no labels are available in the target domain. We use a transformation matrix to transfer both the source and target data to a common subspace, where each target sample can be represented by a combination of source samples such that the samples from different domains can be well interlaced. In this way, the discrepancy of the source and target domains is reduced. By imposing joint low-rank and sparse constraints on the reconstruction coefficient matrix, the global and local structures of data can be preserved. To enlarge the margins between different classes as much as possible and provide more freedom to diminish the discrepancy, a flexible linear classifier (projection) is obtained by learning a non-negative label relaxation matrix that allows the strict binary label matrix to relax into a slack variable matrix. Our method can avoid a potentially negative transfer by using a sparse matrix to model the noise and, thus, is more robust to different types of noise. We formulate our problem as a constrained low-rankness and sparsity minimization problem and solve it by the inexact augmented Lagrange multiplier method. Extensive experiments on various visual domain adaptation tasks show the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the art methods. The MATLAB code of our method will be publicly available at http: www.yongxu.org lunwen.html . To uncover an appropriate latent subspace for data representation, in this paper we propose a novel Robust Structured Subspace Learning (RSSL) algorithm by integrating image understanding and feature learning into a joint learning framework. The learned subspace is adopted as an intermediate space to reduce the semantic gap between the low-level visual features and the high-level semantics. To guarantee the subspace to be compact and discriminative, the intrinsic geometric structure of data, and the local and global structural consistencies over labels are exploited simultaneously in the proposed algorithm. Besides, we adopt the @math -norm for the formulations of loss function and regularization respectively to make our algorithm robust to the outliers and noise. An efficient algorithm is designed to solve the proposed optimization problem. It is noted that the proposed framework is a general one which can leverage several well-known algorithms as special cases and elucidate their intrinsic relationships. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on diversity datasets for different image understanding tasks, i.e., image tagging, clustering, and classification, and the more encouraging results are achieved compared with some state-of-the-art approaches. Transfer learning has benefited many real-world applications where labeled data are abundant in source domains but scarce in the target domain. As there are usually multiple relevant domains where knowledge can be transferred, multiple source transfer learning MSTL has recently attracted much attention. However, we are facing two major challenges when applying MSTL. First, without knowledge about the difference between source and target domains, negative transfer occurs when knowledge is transferred from highly irrelevant sources. Second, existence of imbalanced distributions in classes, where examples in one class dominate, can lead to improper judgement on the source domains' relevance to the target task. Since existing MSTL methods are usually designed to transfer from relevant sources with balanced distributions, they will fail in applications where these two challenges persist. In this article, we propose a novel two-phase framework to effectively transfer knowledge from multiple sources even when there exists irrelevant sources and imbalanced class distributions. First, an effective supervised local weight scheme is proposed to assign a proper weight to each source domain's classifier based on its ability of predicting accurately on each local region of the target domain. The second phase then learns a classifier for the target domain by solving an optimization problem which concerns both training error minimization and consistency with weighted predictions gained from source domains. A theoretical analysis shows that as the number of source domains increases, the probability that the proposed approach has an error greater than a bound is becoming exponentially small. We further extend the proposed approach to an online processing scenario to conduct transfer learning on continuously arriving data. Extensive experiments on disease prediction, spam filtering and intrusion detection datasets demonstrate that: i the proposed two-phase approach outperforms existing MSTL approaches due to its ability of tackling negative transfer and imbalanced distribution challenges, and ii the proposed online approach achieves comparable performance to the offline scheme. Metric learning has proved very successful. However, human annotations are necessary. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method, dubbed Metric Imitation (MI), where metrics over cheap features (target features, TFs) are learned by imitating the standard metrics over more sophisticated, off-the-shelf features (source features, SFs) by transferring view-independent property manifold structures. In particular, MI consists of: 1) quantifying the properties of source metrics as manifold geometry, 2) transferring the manifold from source domain to target domain, and 3) learning a mapping of TFs so that the manifold is approximated as well as possible in the mapped feature domain. MI is useful in at least two scenarios where: 1) TFs are more efficient computationally and in terms of memory than SFs; and 2) SFs contain privileged information, but are not available during testing. For the former, MI is evaluated on image clustering, category-based image retrieval, and instance-based object retrieval, with three SFs and three TFs. For the latter, MI is tested on the task of example-based image super-resolution, where high-resolution patches are taken as SFs and low-resolution patches as TFs. Experiments show that MI is able to provide good metrics while avoiding expensive data labeling efforts and that it achieves state-of-the-art performance for image super-resolution. In addition, manifold transfer is an interesting direction of transfer learning. We consider an interesting problem in this paper that uses transfer learning in two directions to compensate missing knowledge from the target domain. Transfer learning tends to be exploited as a powerful tool that mitigates the discrepancy between different databases used for knowledge transfer. It can also be used for knowledge transfer between different modalities within one database. However, in either case, transfer learning will fail if the target data are missing. To overcome this, we consider knowledge transfer between different databases and modalities simultaneously in a single framework, where missing target data from one database are recovered to facilitate recognition task. We referred to this framework as Latent Low-rank Transfer Subspace Learning method (L2TSL). We first propose to use a low-rank constraint as well as dictionary learning in a learned subspace to guide the knowledge transfer between and within different databases. We then introduce a latent factor to uncover the underlying structure of the missing target data. Next, transfer learning in two directions is proposed to integrate auxiliary database for transfer learning with missing target data. Experimental results of multi-modalities knowledge transfer with missing target data demonstrate that our method can successfully inherit knowledge from the auxiliary database to complete the target domain, and therefore enhance the performance when recognizing data from the modality without any training data. The objective of sparse metric learning is to learn a distance measure from a set of data in addition to finding a low-dimensional representation. Despite demonstrated success, the performance of existing sparse metric learning approaches is usually limited because the methods assumes certain problem relaxations or they target the SML objective indirectly. In this paper, we propose a Generalized Sparse Metric Learning method. This novel framework offers a unified view for understanding many existing sparse metric learning algorithms including the Sparse Metric Learning framework proposed in (Rosales and Fung ACM International conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD), pp 367–373, 2006), the Large Margin Nearest Neighbor ( in Advances in neural information processing systems (NIPS), 2006; Weinberger and Saul in Proceedings of the twenty-fifth international conference on machine learning (ICML-2008), 2008), and the D-ranking Vector Machine (D-ranking VM) (Ouyang and Gray in Proceedings of the twenty-fifth international conference on machine learning (ICML-2008), 2008). Moreover, GSML also establishes a close relationship with the Pairwise Support Vector Machine ( in BMC Bioinform, 8, 2007). Furthermore, the proposed framework is capable of extending many current non-sparse metric learning models to their sparse versions including Relevant Component Analysis (Bar- in J Mach Learn Res, 6:937–965, 2005) and a state-of-the-art method proposed in ( Advances in neural information processing systems (NIPS), 2002). We present the detailed framework, provide theoretical justifications, build various connections with other models, and propose an iterative optimization method, making the framework both theoretically important and practically scalable for medium or large datasets. Experimental results show that this generalized framework outperforms six state-of-the-art methods with higher accuracy and significantly smaller dimensionality for seven publicly available datasets. Sufficient training examples are the fundamental requirement for most of the learning tasks. However, collecting well-labelled training examples is costly. Inspired by Zero-shot Learning (ZSL) that can make use of visual attributes or natural language semantics as an intermediate level clue to associate low-level features with high-level classes, in a novel extension of this idea, we aim to synthesise training data for novel classes using only semantic attributes. Despite the simplicity of this idea, there are several challenges. First, how to prevent the synthesised data from over-fitting to training classes? Second, how to guarantee the synthesised data is discriminative for ZSL tasks? Third, we observe that only a few dimensions of the learnt features gain high variances whereas most of the remaining dimensions are not informative. Thus, the question is how to make the concentrated information diffuse to most of the dimensions of synthesised data. To address the above issues, we propose a novel embedding algorithm named Unseen Visual Data Synthesis (UVDS) that projects semantic features to the high-dimensional visual feature space. Two main techniques are introduced in our proposed algorithm. (1) We introduce a latent embedding space which aims to reconcile the structural difference between the visual and semantic spaces, meanwhile preserve the local structure. (2) We propose a novel Diffusion Regularisation (DR) that explicitly forces the variances to diffuse over most dimensions of the synthesised data. By an orthogonal rotation (more precisely, an orthogonal transformation), DR can remove the redundant correlated attributes and further alleviate the over-fitting problem. On four benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the benefit of using synthesised unseen data for zero-shot learning. Extensive experimental results suggest that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In this article, we focus on the problem of large-scale instance-level image retrieval. For efficiency reasons, it is common to represent an image by a fixed-length descriptor which is subsequently encoded into a small number of bits. We note that most encoding techniques include an unsupervised dimensionality reduction step. Our goal in this work is to learn a better subspace in a supervised manner. We especially raise the following question: "can category-level labels be used to learn such a subspace?" To answer this question, we experiment with four learning techniques: the first one is based on a metric learning framework, the second one on attribute representations, the third one on Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and the fourth one on Joint Subspace and Classifier Learning (JSCL). While the first three approaches have been applied in the past to the image retrieval problem, we believe we are the first to show the usefulness of JSCL in this context. In our experiments, we use ImageNet as a source of category-level labels and report retrieval results on two standard dataseis: INRIA Holidays and the University of Kentucky benchmark. Our experimental study shows that metric learning and attributes do not lead to any significant improvement in retrieval accuracy, as opposed to CCA and JSCL. As an example, we report on Holidays an increase in accuracy from 39.3 to 48.6 with 32-dimensional representations. Overall JSCL is shown to yield the best results. Metric learning aims at finding a distance that approximates a task-specific notion of semantic similarity. Typically, a Mahalanobis distance is learned from pairs of data labeled as being semantically similar or not. In this paper, we learn such metrics in a weakly supervised setting where "bags" of instances are labeled with "bags" of labels. We formulate the problem as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem over pairs of bags. If two bags share at least one label, we label the pair positive, and negative otherwise. We propose to learn a metric using those labeled pairs of bags, leading to MildML, for multiple instance logistic discriminant metric learning. MildML iterates between updates of the metric and selection of putative positive pairs of examples from positive pairs of bags. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a large and challenging data set, Labeled Yahoo! News, which we have manually annotated and contains 31147 detected faces of 5873 different people in 20071 images. We group the faces detected in an image into a bag, and group the names detected in the caption into a corresponding set of labels. When the labels come from manual annotation, we find that MildML using the bag-level annotation performs as well as fully supervised metric learning using instance-level annotation. We also consider performance in the case of automatically extracted labels for the bags, where some of the bag labels do not correspond to any example in the bag. In this case MildML works substantially better than relying on noisy instance-level annotations derived from the bag-level annotation by resolving face-name associations in images with their captions. We address the task of learning a semantic segmentation from weakly supervised data. Our aim is to devise a system that predicts an object label for each pixel by making use of only image level labels during training – the information whether a certain object is present or not in the image. Such coarse tagging of images is faster and easier to obtain as opposed to the tedious task of pixelwise labeling required in state of the art systems. We cast this task naturally as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem. We use Semantic Texton Forest (STF) as the basic framework and extend it for the MIL setting. We make use of multitask learning (MTL) to regularize our solution. Here, an external task of geometric context estimation is used to improve on the task of semantic segmentation. We report experimental results on the MSRC21 and the very challenging VOC2007 datasets. On MSRC21 dataset we are able, by using 276 weakly labeled images, to achieve the performance of a supervised STF trained on pixelwise labeled training set of 56 images, which is a significant reduction in supervision needed. Abstract: Distance metric learning (DML) approaches learn a transformation to a representation space where distance is in correspondence with a predefined notion of similarity. While such models offer a number of compelling benefits, it has been difficult for these to compete with modern classification algorithms in performance and even in feature extraction. In this work, we propose a novel approach explicitly designed to address a number of subtle yet important issues which have stymied earlier DML algorithms. It maintains an explicit model of the distributions of the different classes in representation space. It then employs this knowledge to adaptively assess similarity, and achieve local discrimination by penalizing class distribution overlap. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this idea on several tasks. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art classification results on a number of fine-grained visual recognition datasets, surpassing the standard softmax classifier and outperforming triplet loss by a relative margin of 30-40 . In terms of computational performance, it alleviates training inefficiencies in the traditional triplet loss, reaching the same error in 5-30 times fewer iterations. Beyond classification, we further validate the saliency of the learnt representations via their attribute concentration and hierarchy recovery properties, achieving 10-25 relative gains on the softmax classifier and 25-50 on triplet loss in these tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel feature learning framework for video person re-identification (re-ID). The proposed framework largely aims to exploit the adequate temporal information of video sequences and tackle the poor spatial alignment of moving pedestrians. More specifically, for exploiting the temporal information, we design a temporal residual learning (TRL) module to simultaneously extract the generic and specific features of consecutive frames. The TRL module is equipped with two bi-directional LSTM (BiLSTM), which are, respectively, responsible to describe a moving person in different aspects, providing complementary information for better feature representations. To deal with the poor spatial alignment in video re-ID data sets, we propose a spatial-temporal transformer network (ST2N) module. Transformation parameters in the ST2N module are learned by leveraging the high-level semantic information of the current frame as well as the temporal context knowledge from other frames. The proposed ST2N module with less learnable parameters allows effective person alignments under significant appearance changes. Extensive experimental results on the large-scale MARS, PRID2011, ILIDS-VID, and SDU-VID data sets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves consistently superior performance and outperforms most of the very recent state-of-the-art methods. It is expensive to obtain labeled real-world visual data for use in training of supervised algorithms. Therefore, it is valuable to leverage existing databases of labeled data. However, the data in the source databases is often obtained under conditions that differ from those in the new task. Transfer learning provides techniques for transferring learned knowledge from a source domain to a target domain by finding a mapping between them. In this paper, we discuss a method for projecting both source and target data to a generalized subspace where each target sample can be represented by some combination of source samples. By employing a low-rank constraint during this transfer, the structure of source and target domains are preserved. This approach has three benefits. First, good alignment between the domains is ensured through the use of only relevant data in some subspace of the source domain in reconstructing the data in the target domain. Second, the discriminative power of the source domain is naturally passed on to the target domain. Third, noisy information will be filtered out during knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on synthetic data, and important computer vision problems such as face recognition application and visual domain adaptation for object recognition demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over the existing, well-established methods. Distance metric learning (DML) approaches learn a transformation to a representation space where distance is in correspondence with a predefined notion of similarity. While such models offer a number of compelling benefits, it has been difficult for these to compete with modern classification algorithms in performance and even in feature extraction. In this work, we propose a novel approach explicitly designed to address a number of subtle yet important issues which have stymied earlier DML algorithms. It maintains an explicit model of the distributions of the different classes in representation space. It then employs this knowledge to adaptively assess similarity, and achieve local discrimination by penalizing class distribution overlap. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this idea on several tasks. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art classification results on a number of fine-grained visual recognition datasets, surpassing the standard softmax classifier and outperforming triplet loss by a relative margin of 30-40 . In terms of computational performance, it alleviates training inefficiencies in the traditional triplet loss, reaching the same error in 5-30 times fewer iterations. Beyond classification, we further validate the saliency of the learnt representations via their attribute concentration and hierarchy recovery properties, achieving 10-25 relative gains on the softmax classifier and 25-50 on triplet loss in these tasks. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) can be considered as a special case of transfer learning where the source and target domains have different tasks label spaces and the target domain is unlabelled, providing little guidance for the knowledge transfer. A ZSL method typically assumes that the two domains share a common semantic representation space, where a visual feature vector extracted from an image video can be projected embedded using a projection function. Existing approaches learn the projection function from the source domain and apply it without adaptation to the target domain. They are thus based on naive knowledge transfer and the learned projections are prone to the domain shift problem. In this paper a novel ZSL method is proposed based on unsupervised domain adaptation. Specifically, we formulate a novel regularised sparse coding framework which uses the target domain class labels' projections in the semantic space to regularise the learned target domain projection thus effectively overcoming the projection domain shift problem. Extensive experiments on four object and action recognition benchmark datasets show that the proposed ZSL method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts. Most of the existing domain adaptation learning (DAL) methods relies on a single source domain to learn a classifier with well-generalized performance for the target domain of interest, which may lead to the so-called negative transfer problem. To this end, many multi-source adaptation methods have been proposed. While the advantages of using multi-source domains of information for establishing an adaptation model have been widely recognized, how to boost the robustness of the computational model for multi-source adaptation learning has only recently received attention. To address this issue for achieving enhanced performance, we propose in this paper a novel algorithm called multi-source Adaptation Regularization Joint Kernel Sparse Representation (ARJKSR) for robust visual classification problems. Specifically, ARJKSR jointly represents target dataset by a sparse linear combination of training data of each source domain in some optimal Reproduced Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), recovered by simultaneously minimizing the inter-domain distribution discrepancy and maximizing the local consistency, whilst constraining the observations from both target and source domains to share their sparse representations. The optimization problem of ARJKSR can be solved using an efficient alternative direction method. Under the framework ARJKSR, we further learn a robust label prediction matrix for the unlabeled instances of target domain based on the classical graph-based semi-supervised learning (GSSL) diagram, into which multiple Laplacian graphs constructed with the ARJKSR are incorporated. The validity of our method is examined by several visual classification problems. Results demonstrate the superiority of our method in comparison to several state-of-the-arts. Most previous heterogeneous transfer learning methods learn a cross-domain feature mapping between heterogeneous feature spaces based on a few cross-domain instance-correspondences, and these corresponding instances are assumed to be representative in the source and target domains respectively. However, in many real-world scenarios, this assumption may not hold. As a result, the constructed feature mapping may not be precise due to the bias issue of the correspondences in the target or (and) source domain(s). In this case, a classifier trained on the labeled transformed-source-domain data may not be useful for the target domain. In this paper, we present a new transfer learning framework called Hybrid Heterogeneous Transfer Learning (HHTL), which allows the corresponding instances across domains to be biased in either the source or target domain. Specifically, we propose a deep learning approach to learn a feature mapping between cross-domain heterogeneous features as well as a better feature representation for mapped data to reduce the bias issue caused by the cross-domain correspondences. Extensive experiments on several multilingual sentiment classification tasks verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach compared with some baseline methods. General zero-shot learning (ZSL) approaches exploit transfer learning via semantic knowledge space. In this paper, we reveal a novel relational knowledge transfer (RKT) mechanism for ZSL, which is simple, generic and effective. RKT resolves the inherent semantic shift problem existing in ZSL through restoring the missing manifold structure of unseen categories via optimizing semantic mapping. It extracts the relational knowledge from data manifold structure in semantic knowledge space based on sparse coding theory. The extracted knowledge is then transferred backwards to generate virtual data for unseen categories in the feature space. On the one hand, the generalizing ability of the semantic mapping function can be enhanced with the added data. On the other hand, the mapping function for unseen categories can be learned directly from only these generated data, achieving inspiring performance. Incorporated with RKT, even simple baseline methods can achieve good results. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets show prominent performance obtained by RKT, and we obtain 82.43 accuracy on the Animals with Attributes dataset.