Face clustering is a method for unlabeled image annotation and has attracted increasing attention. Existing methods have made significant breakthroughs by introducing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) on the affinity graph. However, such graphs will contain many vertex pairs with inconsistent similarities and labels, thus degrading the model's performance. There are already relevant efforts for this problem, but the information about features needs to be mined further. In this paper, we define a new concept called confidence edge and guide the construction of graphs. Furthermore, a novel confidence-GCN is proposed to cluster face images by deriving more confidence edges. Firstly, Local Information Fusion is advanced to obtain a more accurate similarity metric by considering the neighbors of vertices. Then Unsupervised Neighbor Determination is used to discard low-quality edges based on similarity differences. Moreover, we elaborate that the remaining edges retain the most beneficial information to demonstrate the validity. At last, the confidence-GCN takes the graph as the input and fully uses the confidence edges to complete the clustering. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods on the face and person datasets to achieve state-of-the-art. At the same time, comparable results are obtained on the fashion dataset.

Deep semantic retrieval has achieved remarkable success in online E-commerce applications. The majority of methods aim to distinguish positive items and negative items for each query by utilizing margin loss or softmax loss. Despite their decent performance, these methods are highly sensitive to hyper-parameters, i.e., margin and temperature 𝜏 , which measure the similarity of negative pairs and affect the distribution of items in metric space. How to design and choose adaptively parameters for different pairs is still an open challenge. Recently several methods have attempted to alleviate the above problem by learning each parameter through trainable/statistical methods in the recommendation. We argue that those are not suitable for retrieval scenarios, due to the agnosticism and diversity of the queries. To fully overcome this limitation, we propose a novel adaptive metric learning method that designs a simple and universal hyper-parameter-free learning method to improve the performance of retrieval. Specifically, we first propose a method that adaptive obtains the hyper-parameters by relying on the batch similarity without fixed or extra-trainable hyper-parameters. Subsequently, we adopt a symmetric metric learning method to mitigate model collapse issues. Furthermore, the proposed method is general and sheds a highlight on other fields. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method significantly outperforms previous methods on a real-world dataset, highlighting the superiority and effectiveness of our method. This method has been successfully deployed on an online E-commerce search platform and brought substantial economic benefits.