  The group membership prediction (GMP) problem involves predicting whether or
not a collection of instances share a certain semantic property. For instance,
in kinship verification given a collection of images, the goal is to predict
whether or not they share a {\it familial} relationship. In this context we
propose a novel probability model and introduce latent {\em view-specific} and
{\em view-shared} random variables to jointly account for the view-specific
appearance and cross-view similarities among data instances. Our model posits
that data from each view is independent conditioned on the shared variables.
This postulate leads to a parametric probability model that decomposes group
membership likelihood into a tensor product of data-independent parameters and
data-dependent factors. We propose learning the data-independent parameters in
a discriminative way with bilinear classifiers, and test our prediction
algorithm on challenging visual recognition tasks such as multi-camera person
re-identification and kinship verification. On most benchmark datasets, our
method can significantly outperform the current state-of-the-art.
