Collaborative Self-Regression Method With Nonlinear Feature Based on Multi-Task Learning for Image Classification

Multi-task learning has received great interest recently in the area of machine learning. It shows a considerable capacity to jointly learn multiple latent relationships hidden among tasks, and has been widely used in data mining and computer vision problems. In this paper, we propose a new multi-task based collaborative linear regression framework to address the image classification problem, which allows the class-specific and collaboratively shared latent structure components to be explored simultaneously. The proposed framework takes multi-target regression of each class as a task to transfer shared structures among them. To be more efficient and adaptive, the class-wise nonlinear subspace is also learned in this framework to earn inter-class discrimination and model adaptability. The proposed framework provides a unified and flexible perceptiveness for jointly learning the nonlinear projected features and regression parameters. Furthermore, a numerical scheme via iterative alternating optimization is also developed to solve the novel objective function in the proposed framework and guarantee the convergence. Extensive experimental results tested on several datasets demonstrated that our proposed framework outperforms existing competitive methods and achieves consistently high performance.