Transductive Aesthetic Preference Propagation for Personalized Image Aesthetics Assessment

Personalized image aesthetics assessment (PIAA) aims at capturing individual aesthetic preference. Fine-tuning on personalized data has been proven to be effective in PIAA task. However, a fixed fine-tuning strategy may cause under/over-fitting on limited personal data and it also brings additional training cost. To alleviate these issues, we employ a meta learning-based Transductive Aesthetic Preference Propagation (TAPP-PIAA) algorithm under regression manner to substitute the fine-tuning strategy. Specifically, each user's data is regarded as a meta-task and spilt into support and query set. Then, we extract deep aesthetic features with a pre-trained generic image aesthetic assessment (GIAA) model. Next, we treat image features as graph nodes and their similarities as edge weights to construct an undirected nearest neighbor graph for inference. Instead of fine-tuning on support set, TAPP-PIAA propagates aesthetic preference from support to query set with a predefined propagation formula. Finally, to learn a generalizable aesthetic representation for various users, we optimize our TAPP-PIAA across different users with meta-learning framework. Experimental results indicate that our TAPP-PIAA can surpass the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark databases.