Energy Confused Adversarial Metric Learning for Zero-Shot Image Retrieval and Clustering

Deep metric learning has been widely applied in many computer vision tasks, and recently, it is more attractive in \emph{zero-shot image retrieval and clustering}(ZSRC) where a good embedding is requested such that the unseen classes can be distinguished well. Most existing works deem this 'good' embedding just to be the discriminative one and thus race to devise powerful metric objectives or hard-sample mining strategies for leaning discriminative embedding. However, in this paper, we first emphasize that the generalization ability is a core ingredient of this 'good' embedding as well and largely affects the metric performance in zero-shot settings as a matter of fact. Then, we propose the Energy Confused Adversarial Metric Learning(ECAML) framework to explicitly optimize a robust metric. It is mainly achieved by introducing an interesting Energy Confusion regularization term, which daringly breaks away from the traditional metric learning idea of discriminative objective devising, and seeks to 'confuse' the learned model so as to encourage its generalization ability by reducing overfitting on the seen classes. We train this confusion term together with the conventional metric objective in an adversarial manner. Although it seems weird to 'confuse' the network, we show that our ECAML indeed serves as an efficient regularization technique for metric learning and is applicable to various conventional metric methods. This paper empirically and experimentally demonstrates the importance of learning embedding with good generalization, achieving state-of-the-art performances on the popular CUB, CARS, Stanford Online Products and In-Shop datasets for ZSRC tasks. \textcolor[rgb]{1, 0, 0}{Code available at http://www.bhchen.cn/}.Comment: AAAI 2019, Spotligh

Organization mechanism and counting algorithm on Vertex-Cover solutions

Counting the solution number of combinational optimization problems is an important topic in the study of computational complexity, especially on the #P-complete complexity class. In this paper, we first investigate some organizations of Vertex-Cover unfrozen subgraphs by the underlying connectivity and connected components of unfrozen vertices. Then, a Vertex-Cover Solution Number Counting Algorithm is proposed and its complexity analysis is provided, the results of which fit very well with the simulations and have better performance than those by 1-RSB in a neighborhood of c = e for random graphs. Base on the algorithm, variation and fluctuation on the solution number statistics are studied to reveal the evolution mechanism of the solution numbers. Besides, marginal probability distributions on the solution space are investigated on both random graph and scale-free graph to illustrate different evolution characteristics of their solution spaces. Thus, doing solution number counting based on graph expression of solution space should be an alternative and meaningful way to study the hardness of NP-complete and #P-complete problems, and appropriate algorithm design can help to achieve better approximations of solving combinational optimization problems and the corresponding counting problems.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure