Deep metric learning plays a key role in various machine learning tasks. Most of the previous works have been confined to sampling from a mini-batch, which cannot precisely characterize the global geometry of the embedding space. Although researchers have developed proxy-and classification-based methods to tackle the sampling issue, those methods inevitably incur a redundant computational cost. In this paper, we propose a novel Proxy-based deep Graph Metric Learning (ProxyGML) approach from the perspective of graph classification, which uses fewer proxies yet achieves better comprehensive performance. Specifically, multiple global proxies are leveraged to collectively approximate the original data points for each class. To efficiently capture local neighbor relationships, a small number of such proxies are adaptively selected to construct similarity subgraphs between these proxies and each data point. Further, we design a novel reverse label propagation algorithm, by which the neighbor relationships are adjusted according to ground-truth labels, so that a discriminative metric space can be learned during the process of subgraph classification. Extensive experiments carried out on widely-used CUB-200-2011, Cars196, and Stanford Online Products datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ProxyGML over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.

Intelligent streetlight systems divide the streetlight network into multiple sectors, activating only the streetlights in the corresponding sectors when traffic elements pass by, rather than all streetlights, effectively reducing energy waste. This strategy requires streetlights to understand their neighbor relationships to illuminate only the streetlights in their respective sectors. However, manually configuring the neighbor relationships for a large number of streetlights in complex large-scale road streetlight networks is cumbersome and prone to errors. Due to the crisscrossing nature of roads, it is also difficult to determine the neighbor relationships using GPS or communication positioning. In response to these issues, this article proposes a systematic approach to model the streetlight network as a social network and construct a neighbor relationship probabilistic graph using IoT event records of streetlights detecting traffic elements. Based on this, a multi-objective genetic algorithm based probabilistic graph clustering method is designed to discover the neighbor relationships of streetlights. Considering the characteristic that pedestrians and vehicles usually move at a constant speed on a section of a road, speed consistency is introduced as an optimization objective, which, together with traditional similarity measures, forms a multi-objective function, enhancing the accuracy of neighbor relationship discovery. Extensive experiments on simulation datasets were conducted, comparing the proposed algorithm with other probabilistic graph clustering algorithms. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can more accurately identify the neighbor relationships of streetlights compared to other algorithms, effectively achieving adaptive streetlight control for traffic elements.

Deep metric learning plays a key role in various machine learning tasks. Most of the previous works have been confined to sampling from a mini-batch, which cannot precisely characterize the global geometry of the embedding space. Although researchers have developed proxy- and classification-based methods to tackle the sampling issue, those methods inevitably incur a redundant computational cost. In this paper, we propose a novel Proxy-based deep Graph Metric Learning (ProxyGML) approach from the perspective of graph classification, which uses fewer proxies yet achieves better comprehensive performance. Specifically, multiple global proxies are leveraged to collectively approximate the original data points for each class.