# Learnt quasi-transitive similarity for retrieval from large collections of faces

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00560 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00560/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Dynamic Topology Optimization for Non-IID Data in Decentralized Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03383/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We are interested in identity-based retrieval of face sets from large unlabelled collections acquired in uncontrolled environments. Given a baseline algorithm for measuring the similarity of two face sets, the meta-algorithm introduced in this paper seeks to leverage the structure of the data corpus to make the best use of the available baseline. In particular, we show how partial transitivity of inter-personal similarity can be exploited to improve the retrieval of particularly challenging sets which poorly match the query under the baseline measure. We: (i) describe the use of proxy sets as a means of computing the similarity between two sets, (ii) introduce transitivity meta-features based on the similarity of salient modes of appearance variation between sets, (iii) show how quasi-transitivity can be learnt from such features without any labelling or manual intervention, and (iv) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology through experiments on the notoriously challenging YouTube database and two successful baselines from the literature.