Attribute Adaptation for Personalized Image Search

Current methods learn monolithic attribute predictors, with the assumption that a single model is sufficient to reflect human understanding of a visual attribute. However, in reality, humans vary in how they perceive the association between a named property and image content. For example, two people may have slightly different internal models for what makes a shoe look "formal", or they may disagree on which of two scenes looks "more cluttered". Rather than discount these differences as noise, we propose to learn user-specific attribute models. We adapt a generic model trained with annotations from multiple users, tailoring it to satisfy user-specific labels. Furthermore, we propose novel techniques to infer user-specific labels based on transitivity and contradictions in the user\´s search history. We demonstrate that adapted attributes improve accuracy over both existing monolithic models as well as models that learn from scratch with user-specific data alone. In addition, we show how adapted attributes are useful to personalize image search, whether with binary or relative attributes.