Visual attributes, which refer to human-labeled semantic annotations, have
gained increasing popularity in a wide range of real world applications.
Generally, the existing attribute learning methods fall into two categories:
one focuses on learning user-specific labels separately for different
attributes, while the other one focuses on learning crowd-sourced global labels
jointly for multiple attributes. However, both categories ignore the joint
effect of the two mentioned factors: the personal diversity with respect to the
global consensus; and the intrinsic correlation among multiple attributes. To
overcome this challenge, we propose a novel model to learn user-specific
predictors across multiple attributes. In our proposed model, the diversity of
personalized opinions and the intrinsic relationship among multiple attributes
are unified in a common-to-special manner. To this end, we adopt a
three-component decomposition. Specifically, our model integrates a common
cognition factor, an attribute-specific bias factor and a user-specific bias
factor. Meanwhile Lasso and group Lasso penalties are adopted to leverage
efficient feature selection. Furthermore, theoretical analysis is conducted to
show that our proposed method could reach reasonable performance. Eventually,
the empirical study carried out in this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of
our proposed method
