A Metric Learning Reality Check

Deep metric learning papers from the past four years have consistently claimed great advances in accuracy, often more than doubling the performance of decade-old methods. In this paper, we take a closer look at the field to see if this is actually true. We find flaws in the experimental setup of these papers, and propose a new way to evaluate metric learning algorithms. Finally, we present experimental results that show that the improvements over time have been marginal at best.