On Convergence Properties of Implicit Self-paced Objective

Self-paced learning (SPL) is a new methodology that simulates the learning principle of humans/animals to start learning easier aspects of a learning task, and then gradually take more complex examples into training. This new-coming learning regime has been empirically substantiated to be effective in various computer vision and pattern recognition tasks. Recently, it has been proved that the SPL regime has a close relationship with a implicit self-paced objective function. While this implicit objective could provide helpful interpretations to the effectiveness, especially the robustness, insights under the SPL paradigms, there are still no theoretical results to verify such relationship. To this issue, we provide some convergence results on the implicit objective of SPL. Specifically, we will prove that the learning process of SPL always converges to critical points of this implicit objective under some mild conditions. This result verifies the intrinsic relationship between SPL and this implicit objective, and makes the previous robustness analysis on SPL complete and theoretically rational. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved