Similarity metrics are a core component of many information retrieval and machine learning systems. In this work we propose a method capable of learning a similarity metric from data equipped with a binary relation. By considering only the similarity constraints, and initially ignoring the features, we are able to learn target vectors for each instance using one of several appropriately designed loss functions. A regression model can then be constructed that maps novel feature vectors to the same target vector space, resulting in a feature extractor that computes vectors for which a predefined metric is a meaningful measure of similarity. We present results on both multiclass and multi-label classification datasets that demonstrate considerably faster convergence, as well as higher accuracy on the majority of the intrinsic evaluation tasks and all extrinsic evaluation tasks.
The first application of neural networks to metric learning was with the introduction of Siamese networks @cite_21 . The original authors initially applied these models to signature verification, however others have since used this technique for many other domains such as face recognition and verification @cite_6 . Siamese networks are composed of two standard feed forward neural networks that have the same topology and share the same parameters. The output of these subnetworks is then compared with the cosine similarity function to produce the final output of the network, indicating whether the instances propagated through the two subnetworks are similar or not. During training the network is presented with pairs of instances labelled either positive or negative. For positive pairs the cosine similarity is maximised, whereas for negative pairs it is minimised.
@cite_21 @cite_6
2171590421 2145287260
This paper describes the development of an algorithm for verification of signatures written on a touch-sensitive pad. The signature verification algorithm is based on an artificial neural network. The novel network presented here, called a Siamese time delay neural network, consists of two identical networks joined at their output. During training the network learns to measure the similarity between pairs of signatures. When used for verification, only one half of the Siamese network is evaluated. The output of this half network is the feature vector for the input signature. Verification consists of comparing this feature vector with a stored feature vector for the signer. Signatures closer than a chosen threshold to this stored representation are accepted, all other signatures are rejected as forgeries. System performance is illustrated with experiments performed in the laboratory. In recent years, the performance of face verification systems has significantly improved using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). A typical pipeline for face verification includes training a deep network for subject classification with softmax loss, using the penultimate layer output as the feature descriptor, and generating a cosine similarity score given a pair of face images. The softmax loss function does not optimize the features to have higher similarity score for positive pairs and lower similarity score for negative pairs, which leads to a performance gap. In this paper, we add an L2-constraint to the feature descriptors which restricts them to lie on a hypersphere of a fixed radius. This module can be easily implemented using existing deep learning frameworks. We show that integrating this simple step in the training pipeline significantly boosts the performance of face verification. Specifically, we achieve state-of-the-art results on the challenging IJB-A dataset, achieving True Accept Rate of 0.909 at False Accept Rate 0.0001 on the face verification protocol. Additionally, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on LFW dataset with an accuracy of 99.78 , and competing performance on YTF dataset with accuracy of 96.08 .