3,412 research outputs found
An Efficient Dual Approach to Distance Metric Learning
Distance metric learning is of fundamental interest in machine learning
because the distance metric employed can significantly affect the performance
of many learning methods. Quadratic Mahalanobis metric learning is a popular
approach to the problem, but typically requires solving a semidefinite
programming (SDP) problem, which is computationally expensive. Standard
interior-point SDP solvers typically have a complexity of (with
the dimension of input data), and can thus only practically solve problems
exhibiting less than a few thousand variables. Since the number of variables is
, this implies a limit upon the size of problem that can
practically be solved of around a few hundred dimensions. The complexity of the
popular quadratic Mahalanobis metric learning approach thus limits the size of
problem to which metric learning can be applied. Here we propose a
significantly more efficient approach to the metric learning problem based on
the Lagrange dual formulation of the problem. The proposed formulation is much
simpler to implement, and therefore allows much larger Mahalanobis metric
learning problems to be solved. The time complexity of the proposed method is
, which is significantly lower than that of the SDP approach.
Experiments on a variety of datasets demonstrate that the proposed method
achieves an accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art, but is applicable to
significantly larger problems. We also show that the proposed method can be
applied to solve more general Frobenius-norm regularized SDP problems
approximately
Simultaneous Codeword Optimization (SimCO) for Dictionary Update and Learning
We consider the data-driven dictionary learning problem. The goal is to seek
an over-complete dictionary from which every training signal can be best
approximated by a linear combination of only a few codewords. This task is
often achieved by iteratively executing two operations: sparse coding and
dictionary update. In the literature, there are two benchmark mechanisms to
update a dictionary. The first approach, such as the MOD algorithm, is
characterized by searching for the optimal codewords while fixing the sparse
coefficients. In the second approach, represented by the K-SVD method, one
codeword and the related sparse coefficients are simultaneously updated while
all other codewords and coefficients remain unchanged. We propose a novel
framework that generalizes the aforementioned two methods. The unique feature
of our approach is that one can update an arbitrary set of codewords and the
corresponding sparse coefficients simultaneously: when sparse coefficients are
fixed, the underlying optimization problem is similar to that in the MOD
algorithm; when only one codeword is selected for update, it can be proved that
the proposed algorithm is equivalent to the K-SVD method; and more importantly,
our method allows us to update all codewords and all sparse coefficients
simultaneously, hence the term simultaneous codeword optimization (SimCO).
Under the proposed framework, we design two algorithms, namely, primitive and
regularized SimCO. We implement these two algorithms based on a simple gradient
descent mechanism. Simulations are provided to demonstrate the performance of
the proposed algorithms, as compared with two baseline algorithms MOD and
K-SVD. Results show that regularized SimCO is particularly appealing in terms
of both learning performance and running speed.Comment: 13 page
- …