Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (NeurIPS 2020)
Yihao Lv, Youzhi Gu, Liu Xinggao
Triplet loss with batch hard mining (TriHard loss) is an important variation of triplet loss inspired by the idea that hard triplets improve the performance of metric leaning networks. However, there is a dilemma in the training process. The hard negative samples contain various quite similar characteristics compared with anchors and positive samples in a batch. Features of these characteristics should be clustered between anchors and positive samples while are also utilized to repel between anchors and hard negative samples. It is harmful for learning mutual features within classes. Several methods to alleviate the dilemma are designed and tested. In the meanwhile, an element-weighted TriHard loss is emphatically proposed to enlarge the distance between partial elements of feature vectors selectively which represent the different characteristics between anchors and hard negative samples. Extensive evaluations are conducted on Market1501 and MSMT17 datasets and the results achieve state-of-the-art on public baselines.