Partial Order Embedding with Multiple Kernels Brian McFee
[email protected] Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego, CA 92093 USA Gert Lanckriet
[email protected] Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego, CA 92093 USA Abstract tirely different types of transformations may be natural for each modality. It may therefore be better to learn a sepa- We consider the problem of embedding arbitrary rate transformation for each type of feature. When design- objects (e.g., images, audio, documents) into Eu- ing metric learning algorithms for heterogeneous data, care clidean space subject to a partial order over pair- must be taken to ensure that the transformation of features wise distances. Partial order constraints arise nat- is carried out in a principled manner. urally when modeling human perception of simi- larity. Our partial order framework enables the Moreover, in such feature-rich data sets, a notion of simi- use of graph-theoretic tools to more efficiently larity may itself be subjective, varying from person to per- produce the embedding, and exploit global struc- son. This is particularly true of multimedia data, where ture within the constraint set. a person may not be able to consistently decide if two ob- We present an embedding algorithm based on jects (e.g., songs or movies) are similar or not, but can more semidefinite programming, which can be param- reliably produce an ordering of similarity over pairs. Al- eterized by multiple kernels to yield a unified gorithms in this regime must use a sufficiently expressive space from heterogeneous features.