Learning CRFs for Image Parsing with Adaptive Subgradient Descent

Honghui Zhang, Jingdong Wang, Ping Tan, Jinglu Wang, Long Quan; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 3080-3087

We propose an adaptive subgradient descent method to efficiently learn the parameters of CRF models for image parsing. To balance the learning efficiency and performance of the learned CRF models, the parameter learning is iteratively carried out by solving a convex optimization problem in each iteration, which integrates a proximal term to preserve the previously learned information and the large margin preference to distinguish bad labeling and the ground truth labeling. A solution of subgradient descent updating form is derived for the convex optimization problem, with an adaptively determined updating step-size. Besides, to deal with partially labeled training data, we propose a new objective constraint modeling both the labeled and unlabeled parts in the partially labeled training data for the parameter learning of CRF models. The superior learning efficiency of the proposed method is verified by the experiment results on two public datasets. We also demonstrate the powerfulness of our method for handling partially labeled training data.