Jointly Multi-Similarity Loss for Deep Metric Learning

Li Zhang, Shitian Shen, Lingxiao Li, Han Wang, Xueying Li, Jun Lang

Abstract: Deep metric learning has been widely adopted to construct good representations for images and sentences with pair-based loss functions such as contrastive loss and triplet loss. However, these loss functions restrict the effectiveness of learned embedding and face two critical challenges: 1) high bias on account of a large set of uninformative and redundant pairs; 2) low information exploration due to the lack of processing the relation information among pairs. In this paper, we propose the jointly multi-similarity (JMS) loss to address the above challenges with a novel pair weighting strategy that assigns higher weights to the more informative pairs and discards the less informative ones. Specifically, we integrate the relationship information among pairs into a single framework and optimize the JMS loss by considering various information jointly. Furthermore, we extensively compare the JMS loss with other start-of-the-art approaches by conducting multiple experiments on image retrieval and semantic text similarity tasks. The experimental results show that the JMS loss consistently outperforms competitors.