  This paper proposes a joint multi-task learning algorithm to better predict
attributes in images using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). We
consider learning binary semantic attributes through a multi-task CNN model,
where each CNN will predict one binary attribute. The multi-task learning
allows CNN models to simultaneously share visual knowledge among different
attribute categories. Each CNN will generate attribute-specific feature
representations, and then we apply multi-task learning on the features to
predict their attributes. In our multi-task framework, we propose a method to
decompose the overall model's parameters into a latent task matrix and
combination matrix. Furthermore, under-sampled classifiers can leverage shared
statistics from other classifiers to improve their performance. Natural
grouping of attributes is applied such that attributes in the same group are
encouraged to share more knowledge. Meanwhile, attributes in different groups
will generally compete with each other, and consequently share less knowledge.
We show the effectiveness of our method on two popular attribute datasets.
