Sparse metric learning via smooth optimization

In this paper we study the problem of learning a low-rank (sparse) distance ma-trix. We propose a novel metric learning model which can simultaneously con-duct dimension reduction and learn a distance matrix. The sparse representation involves a mixed-norm regularization which is non-convex. We then show that it can be equivalently formulated as a convex saddle (min-max) problem. From this saddle representation, we develop an efficient smooth optimization approach [17] for sparse metric learning, although the learning model is based on a non-differentiable loss function. Finally, we run experiments to validate the effective-ness and efficiency of our sparse metric learning model on various datasets.