Face verification remains a challenging problem in very complex conditions with large variations such as pose, illumination, expression, and occlusions. This problemis exacerbated when we rely unrealistically on a singletraining data source, which is often insufficient to coverthe intrinsically complex face variations. This paperproposes a principled multi-task learning approachbased on Discriminative Gaussian Process Latent VariableModel (DGPLVM), named GaussianFace, for faceverification. In contrast to relying unrealistically on asingle training data source, our model exploits additional data from multiple source-domains to improve the generalization performance of face verification inan unknown target-domain. Importantly, our model can adapt automatically to complex data distributions, and therefore can well capture complex face variations inherent in multiple sources. To enhance discriminative power, we introduced a more efficient equivalent form of Kernel Fisher Discriminant Analysis to DGPLVM.To speed up the process of inference and prediction, we exploited the low rank approximation method. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed model in learning from diverse data sources and generalizing to unseen domains. Specifically, the accuracy of our algorithm achieved an impressive accuracyrate of 98.52% on the well-known and challenging Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark. For the first time, the human-level performance in face verification (97.53%) on LFW is surpassed.

Most word embedding models typically represent each word using a single vector, which makes these models indiscriminative for ubiquitous homonymy and polysemy. In order to enhance discriminativeness, we employ latent topic models to assign topics for each word in the text corpus, and learn topical word embeddings (TWE) based on both words and their topics. In this way, contextual word embeddings can be flexibly obtained to measure contextual word similarity. We can also build document representations, which are more expressive than some widely-used document models such as latent topic models. In the experiments, we evaluate the TWE models on two tasks, contextual word similarity and text classification. The experimental results show that our models outperform typical word embedding models including the multi-prototype version on contextual word similarity, and also exceed latent topic models and other representative document models on text classification.

Stock movements are essentially driven by new information. Market data, financial news, and social sentiment are believed to have impacts on stock markets. To study the correlation between information and stock movements, previous works typically concatenate the features of different information sources into one super feature vector. However, such concatenated vector approaches treat each information source separately and ignore their interactions. In this article, we model the multi-faceted investors’ information and their intrinsic links with tensors. To identify the nonlinear patterns between stock movements and new information, we propose a supervised tensor regression learning approach to investigate the joint impact of different information sources on stock markets. Experiments on CSI 100 stocks in the year 2011 show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art trading strategies.

Image clustering and visual codebook learning are two fundamental problems in computer vision and they are tightly related. On one hand, a good codebook can generate effective feature representations which largely affect clustering performance. On the other hand, class labels obtained from image clustering can serve as supervised information to guide codebook learning. Traditionally, these two processes are conducted separately and their correlation is generally ignored.In this paper, we propose a Double Layer Gaussian Mixture Model (DLGMM) to simultaneously perform image clustering and codebook learning. In DLGMM, two tasks are seamlessly coupled and can mutually promote each other. Cluster labels and codebook are jointly estimated to achieve the overall best performance. To incorporate the spatial coherence between neighboring visual patches, we propose a Spatially Coherent DLGMM which uses a Markov Random Field to encourage neighboring patches to share the same visual word label.We use variational inference to approximate the posterior of latent variables and learn model parameters.Experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of two models.

We consider the problem of learning deep representation when target labels are available. In this paper, we show that there exists intrinsic relationship between target coding and feature representation learning in deep networks. Specifically, we found that distributed binary acode with error correcting capability is more capable of encouraging discriminative features, in comparison tothe 1-of-K coding that is typically used in supervised deep learning. This new finding reveals additional benefit of using error-correcting code for deep model learning,apart from its well-known error correcting property. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular visual benchmark datasets.

We present a probabilistic framework for learning with heterogeneous multiview data where some views are given as ordinal, binary, or real-valued feature matrices, and some views as similarity matrices. Our framework has the following distinguishing aspects: (i) a unified latent factor model for integrating information from diverse feature (ordinal, binary, real) and similarity based views, and predicting the missing data in each view, leveraging view correlations; (ii) seamless adaptation to binary/multiclass classification where data consists of multiple feature and/or similarity-based views; and (iii) an efficient, variational inference algorithm which is especially flexible in modeling the views with ordinal-valued data (by learning the cutpoints for the ordinal data), and extends naturally to streaming data settings. Our framework subsumes methods such as multiview learning and multiple kernel learning as special cases. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on several real-world and benchmarks datasets.

In online bandit learning, the learner aims to minimize a sequence of losses, while only observing the value of each loss at a single point. Although various algorithms and theories have been developed for online bandit learning, most of them are limited to convex losses. In this paper, we investigate the problem of online bandit learning with non-convex losses, and develop an efficient algorithm with formal theoretical guarantees. To be specific, we consider a class of losses which is a composition of a non-increasing scalar function and a linear function. This setting models a wide range of supervised learning applications such as online classification with a non-convex loss. Theoretical analysis shows that our algorithm achieves an O(poly(d)T2/3) regret bound when the variation of the loss function is small. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in online bandit learning that does not rely on convexity.

Learning to rank is an emerging learning task that opens up a diverse set of applications. However, most existing work focuses on learning a single ranking function whilst in many real world applications, there can be many ranking functions to fulfill various retrieval tasks on the same data set. How to train many ranking functions is challenging due to the limited availability of training data which is further compounded when plentiful training data is available for a small subset of the ranking functions. This is particularly true in settings, such as personalized ranking/retrieval, where each person requires a unique ranking function according to their preference, but only the functions of the persons who provide sufficient ratings (of objects, such as movies and music) can be well trained. To address this, we propose to construct a graph where each node corresponds to a retrieval task, and then propagate ranking functions on the graph. We illustrate the usefulness of the idea of propagating ranking functions and our method by exploring two real world applications.

Learning an appropriate feature representation across source and target domains is one of the most effective solutions to domain adaptation problems. Conventional cross-domain feature learning methods rely on the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) induced by a single kernel. Recently, Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL), which bases classifiers on combinations of kernels, has shown improved performance in the tasks without distribution difference between domains. In this paper, we generalize the framework of MKL for cross-domain feature learning and propose a novel Transfer Feature Representation (TFR) algorithm. TFR learns a convex combination of multiple kernels and a linear transformation in a single optimization which integrates the minimization of distribution difference with the preservation of discriminating power across domains. As a result, standard machine learning models trained in the source domain can be reused for the target domain data. After rewritten into a differentiable formulation, TFR can be optimized by a reduced gradient method and reaches the convergence. Experiments in two real-world applications verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices in the form of region covariances are considered rich descriptors for images and videos. Recent studies suggest that exploiting the Riemannian geometry of the SPD manifolds could lead to improved performances for vision applications. For tasks involving processing large-scale and dynamic data in computer vision, the underlying model is required to progressively and efficiently adapt itself to the new and unseen observations. Motivated by these requirements, this paper studies the problem of online dictionary learning on the SPD manifolds. We make use of the Stein divergence to recast the problem of online dictionary learning on the manifolds to a problem in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces, for which, we develop efficient algorithms by taking into account the geometric structure of the SPD manifolds. To our best knowledge, our work is the first study that provides a solution for online dictionary learning on the SPD manifolds. Empirical results on both large-scale image classification task and dynamic video processing tasks validate the superior performance of our approach as compared to several state-of-the-art algorithms.