Pairwise constraint propagation with dual adversarial manifold regularization

Abstract

Pairwise constraints (PCs) composed of must-links (MLs) and cannot-links (CLs) are widely used in many semisupervised tasks. Due to the limited number of PCs, pairwise constraint propagation (PCP) has been proposed to augment them. However, the existing PCP algorithms only adopt a single matrix to contain all the information, which overlooks the differences between the two types of links such that the discriminability of the propagated PCs is compromised. To this end, this article proposes a novel PCP model via dual adversarial manifold regularization to fully explore the potential of the limited initial PCs. Specifically, we propagate MLs and CLs with two separated variables, called similarity and dissimilarity matrices, under the guidance of the graph structure constructed from data samples. At the same time, the adversarial relationship between the two matrices is taken into consideration. The proposed model is formulated as a nonnegative constrained minimization problem, which can be efficiently solved with convergence theoretically guaranteed. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed model, including propagation effectiveness and applications on constrained clustering and metric learning, all of which validate the superior performance of our model to state-of-the-art PCP models.