Robust Latent Common Subspace Learning for Transferable Feature Representation

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel robust latent common subspace learning (RLCSL) method by integrating low-rank and sparse constraints into a joint learning framework. Specifically, we transform the data from source and target domains into a latent common subspace to perform the data reconstruction, i.e., the transformed source data is used to reconstruct the transformed target data. We impose joint low-rank and sparse constraints on the reconstruction coefficient matrix which can achieve following objectives: (1) the data from different domains can be interlaced by using the low-rank constraint; (2) the data from different domains but with the same label can be aligned together by using the sparse constraint. In this way, the new feature representation in the latent common subspace is discriminative and transferable. To learn a suitable classifier, we also integrate the classifier learning and feature representation learning into a unified objective and thus the high-level semantics label (data label) is fully used to guide the learning process of these two tasks. Experiments are conducted on diverse data sets for image, object, and document classifications, and encouraging experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms some state-of-the-arts methods.