%0 Journal Article %T A Probabilistic Framework for Discriminative Dictionary Learning %A Bernard Ghanem %A Narendra Ahuja %J Computer Science %D 2011 %I arXiv %X In this paper, we address the problem of discriminative dictionary learning (DDL), where sparse linear representation and classification are combined in a probabilistic framework. As such, a single discriminative dictionary and linear binary classifiers are learned jointly. By encoding sparse representation and discriminative classification models in a MAP setting, we propose a general optimization framework that allows for a data-driven tradeoff between faithful representation and accurate classification. As opposed to previous work, our learning methodology is capable of incorporating a diverse family of classification cost functions (including those used in popular boosting methods), while avoiding the need for involved optimization techniques. We show that DDL can be solved by a sequence of updates that make use of well-known and well-studied sparse coding and dictionary learning algorithms from the literature. To validate our DDL framework, we apply it to digit classification and face recognition and test it on standard benchmarks. %U http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.2389v1