Papers › The Group Loss for Deep Metric Learning

The Group Loss for Deep Metric Learning

1 Dec 2019ECCV 2020 8arXiv:1912.00385archive 2025-07-28

Ismail Elezi, Sebastiano Vascon, Alessandro Torcinovich, Marcello Pelillo, Laura Leal-Taixe

Deep metric learning has yielded impressive results in tasks such as clustering and image retrieval by leveraging neural networks to obtain highly discriminative feature embeddings, which can be used to group samples into different classes. Much research has been devoted to the design of smart loss functions or data mining strategies for training such networks. Most methods consider only pairs or triplets of samples within a mini-batch to compute the loss function, which is commonly based on the distance between embeddings. We propose Group Loss, a loss function based on a differentiable label-propagation method that enforces embedding similarity across all samples of a group while promoting, at the same time, low-density regions amongst data points belonging to different groups. Guided by the smoothness assumption that "similar objects should belong to the same group", the proposed loss trains the neural network for a classification task, enforcing a consistent labelling amongst samples within a class. We show state-of-the-art results on clustering and image retrieval on several datasets, and show the potential of our method when combined with other techniques such as ensembles

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Tasks

ClusteringImage RetrievalMetric LearningRetrieval

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Metric Learning CARS196 Group Loss R@1 85.6 #26 of 36 Archive leaderboard report
Metric Learning CUB-200-2011 BN-Inception + Group Loss R@1 65.5 #20 of 30 Archive leaderboard report
Metric Learning Stanford Online Products Group Loss R@1 75.7 #33 of 33 Archive leaderboard report

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