Cross-Image-Attention for Conditional Embeddings in Deep Metric Learning

Learning compact image embeddings that yield semantic similarities between images and that generalize to unseen test classes, is at the core of deep metric learning (DML). Finding a mapping from a rich, localized image feature map onto a compact embedding vector is challenging: Although similarity emerges between tuples of images, DML approaches marginalize out information in an individual image before considering another image to which similarity is to be computed. Instead, we propose during training to condition the embedding of an image on the image we want to compare it to. Rather than embedding by a simple pooling as in standard DML, we use cross-attention so that one image can identify relevant features in the other image. Consequently, the attention mechanism establishes a hierarchy of conditional embeddings that gradually incorporates information about the tuple to steer the representation of an individual image. The cross-attention layers bridge the gap between the original unconditional embedding and the final similarity and allow backpropagtion to update encodings more directly than through a lossy pooling layer. At test time we use the resulting improved unconditional embeddings, thus requiring no additional parameters or computational overhead. Experiments on established DML benchmarks show that our cross-attention conditional embedding during training improves the underlying standard DML pipeline significantly so that it outperforms the state-of-the-art.