a simple and effective framework for pairwise deep metric learning

Deep metric learning (DML) has received much attention in deep learning due to its wide applications in computer vision. Previous studies have focused on designing complicated losses and hard example mining methods, which are mostly heuristic and lack of theoretical understanding. In this paper, we cast DML as a simple pairwise binary classification problem that classifies a pair of examples as similar or dissimilar. It identifies the most critical issue in this problem-- imbalanced data pairs. To tackle this issue, we propose a simple and effective framework to sample pairs in a batch of data for updating the model. The key to this framework is to define a robust loss for all pairs over a mini-batch of data, which is formulated by distributionally robust optimization. The flexibility in constructing the uncertainty decision set of the dual variable allows us to recover state-of-the-art complicated losses and also to induce novel variants. Metric Learning aims to learn a metric to measure the distance between examples that captures certain notion of human-defined similarity between examples. Deep metric learning (DML) has emerged as an effective approach for learning a metric by training a deep neural network. Simply speaking, a deep neural network can induce new feature embedding of examples and it is trained in such a way that the Euclidean distance between the induced feature embeddings of two similar examples shall be small and that between the induced feature embeddings of two dissimilar pairs shall be large. DML has been widely used in many tasks such as face recognition (Fan et al. (2017)), image retrieval (Chen & Deng (2019)), and classification (Qian et al. (2015); Li et al. (2019)). However, unlike training a deep neural network by minimizing the classification error, training a deep neural network for metric learning is notoriously more difficult (Qian et al. (2018); Wang et al. (2017)).