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In most kernel based online learning algorithms, when an incoming instance is misclassified, it will be added into the pool of support vectors and assigned with a weight, which often remains unchanged during the rest of the learning process. This is clearly insufficient since when a new support vector is added, we generally expect the weights of the other existing support vectors to be updated in order to reflect the influence of the added support vector. In this paper, we propose a new online learning method, termed Double Updating Online Learning, or DUOL for short, that explicitly addresses this problem. Instead of only assigning a fixed weight to the misclassified example received at the current trial, the proposed online learning algorithm also tries to update the weight for one of the existing support vectors. We show that the mistake bound can be improved by the proposed online learning method. We conduct an extensive set of empirical evaluations for both binary and multi-class online learning tasks. The experimental results show that the proposed technique is considerably more effective than the state-of-the-art online learning algorithms. The source code is available to public at http://www.cais.ntu.edu.sg/∼chhoi/DUOL/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning a good distance metric plays a vital role in many multimedia retrieval and data mining tasks. For example, a typical content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system often relies on an effective distance metric to measure similarity between any two images. Conventional CBIR systems simply adopting Euclidean distance metric often fail to return satisfactory results mainly due to the well-known semantic gap challenge. In this article, we present a novel framework of Semi-Supervised Distance Metric Learning for learning effective distance metrics by exploring the historical relevance feedback log data of a CBIR system and utilizing unlabeled data when log data are limited and noisy. We formally formulate the learning problem into a convex optimization task and then present a new technique, named as "Laplacian Regularized Metric Learning" (LRML). Two efficient algorithms are then proposed to solve the LRML task. Further, we apply the proposed technique to two applications. One direct application is for Collaborative Image Retrieval (CIR), which aims to explore the CBIR log data for improving the retrieval performance of CBIR systems. The other application is for Collaborative Image Clustering (CIC), which aims to explore the CBIR log data for enhancing the clustering performance of image pattern clustering tasks.We conduct extensive evaluation to compare the proposed LRML method with a number of competing methods, including 2 standard metrics, 3 unsupervised metrics, and 4 supervised metrics with side information. Encouraging results validate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most machine learning tasks in data classification and information retrieval require manually labeled data examples in the training stage. The goal of active learning is to select the most informative examples for manual labeling in these learning tasks. Most of the previous studies in active learning have focused on selecting a single unlabeled example in each iteration. This could be inefficient, since the classification model has to be retrained for every acquired labeled example. It is also inappropriate for the setup of information retrieval tasks where the user's relevance feedback is often provided for the top K retrieved items. In this paper, we present a framework for batch mode active learning, which selects a number of informative examples for manual labeling in each iteration. The key feature of batch mode active learning is to reduce the redundancy among the selected examples such that each example provides unique information for model updating. To this end, we employ the Fisher information matrix as the measurement of model uncertainty, and choose the set of unlabeled examples that can efficiently reduce the Fisher information of the classification model. We apply our batch mode active learning framework to both text categorization and image retrieval. Promising results show that our algorithms are significantly more effective than the active learning approaches that select unlabeled examples based only on their informativeness for the classification model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Support vector machine (SVM) active learning is one popular and successful technique for relevance feedback in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Despite the success, conventional SVM active learning has two main drawbacks. First, the performance of SVM is usually limited by the number of labeled examples. It often suffers a poor performance for the small-sized labeled examples, which is the case in relevance feedback. Second, conventional approaches do not take into account the redundancy among examples, and could select multiple examples that are similar (or even identical). In this work, we propose a novel scheme for explicitly addressing the drawbacks. It first learns a kernel function from a mixture of labeled and unlabeled data, and therefore alleviates the problem of small-sized training data. The kernel will then be used for a batch mode active learning method to identify the most informative and diverse examples via a min-max framework. Two novel algorithms are proposed to solve the related combinatorial optimization: the first approach approximates the problem into a quadratic program, and the second solves the combinatorial optimization approximately by a greedy algorithm that exploits the merits of submodular functions. Extensive experiments with image retrieval using both natural photo images and medical images show that the proposed algorithms are significantly more effective than the state-of-the-art approaches. A demo is available at http://msm.cais.ntu.edu.sg/LSCBIR/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relevance feedback has emerged as a powerful tool to boost the retrieval performance in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). In the past, most research efforts in this field have focused on designing effective algorithms for traditional relevance feedback. Given that a CBIR system can collect and store users' relevance feedback information in a history log, an image retrieval system should be able to take advantage of the log data of users' feedback to enhance its retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for log-based relevance feedback that integrates the log of feedback data into the traditional relevance feedback schemes to learn effectively the correlation between low-level image features and high-level concepts. Given the error-prone nature of log data, we present a novel learning technique, named Soft Label Support Vector Machine, to tackle the noisy data problem. Extensive experiments are designed and conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithms based on the COREL image data set. The promising experimental results validate the effectiveness of our log-based relevance feedback scheme empirically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]