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Multiple Metric Learning for Structured Data

2020/02/13 by Nicolò Colombo, Colombo, Nicolo
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Graph Neural Networks #Applications (stat.AP) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Mathematics #Face and Expression Recognition #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Metric Geometry (math.MG) #Remote-Sensing Image Classification

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2002.05747

openalex publication_date 2020/02/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We address the problem of merging graph and feature-space information while learning a metric from structured data. Existing algorithms tackle the problem in an asymmetric way, by either extracting vectorized summaries of the graph structure or adding hard constraints to feature-space algorithms. Following a different path, we define a metric regression scheme where we train metric-constrained linear combinations of dissimilarity matrices. The idea is that the input matrices can be pre-computed dissimilarity measures obtained from any kind of available data (e.g. node attributes or edge structure). As the model inputs are distance measures, we do not need to assume the existence of any underlying feature space. Main challenge is that metric constraints (especially positive-definiteness and sub-additivity), are not automatically respected if, for example, the coefficients of the linear combination are allowed to be negative. Both positive and sub-additive constraints are linear inequalities, but the computational complexity of imposing them scales as O(D3), where D is the size of the input matrices (i.e. the size of the data set). This becomes quickly prohibitive, even when D is relatively small. We propose a new graph-based technique for optimizing under such constraints and show that, in some cases, our approach may reduce the original computational complexity of the optimization process by one order of magnitude. Contrarily to existing methods, our scheme applies to any (possibly non-convex) metric-constrained objective function.

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