Acceleration of Large Margin Metric Learning for Nearest Neighbor Classification Using Triplet Mining and Stratified Sampling

Abstract

Metric learning is a technique in manifold learning to find a projection subspace for increasing and decreasing the inter- and intra-class variances, respectively. Some metric learning methods are based on triplet learning with anchor-positive-negative triplets. Large margin metric learning for nearest neighbor classification is one of the fundamental methods to do this. Recently, Siamese networks have been introduced with the triplet loss. Many triplet mining methods have been developed for Siamese nets; however, these techniques have not been applied on the triplets of large margin metric learning. In this work, inspired by the mining methods for Siamese nets, we propose several triplet mining techniques for large margin metric learning. Moreover, a hierarchical approach is proposed, for acceleration and scalability of optimization, where triplets are selected by stratified sampling in hierarchical hyper-spheres. We analyze the proposed methods on three publicly available datasets.