Hypergraph-Induced Semantic Tuplet Loss for Deep Metric Learning

In this paper, we propose Hypergraph-Induced Semantic Tuplet (HIST) loss for deep metric learning that leverages the multilateral semantic relations of multiple samples to multiple classes via hypergraph modeling. We formulate deep metric learning as a hypergraph node classification problem in which each sample in a mini-batch is regarded as a node and each hyperedge models class-specific semantic relations represented by a semantic tuplet. Unlike previous graph-based losses that only use a bundle of pairwise relations, our HIST loss takes advantage of the multilateral semantic relations provided by the semantic tuplets through hypergraph modeling. Notably, by leveraging the rich multilateral semantic relations, HIST loss guides the embedding model to learn class-discriminative visual semantics, contributing to better generalization performance and model robustness against input corruptions. Extensive experiments and ablations provide a strong motivation for the proposed method and show that our HIST loss leads to improved feature learning, achieving state-of-the-art results on three widely used benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/ljin0429/HIST.