Summary: Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a useful technique to learn a parts-based representation by decomposing the original data matrix into a basis set and coefficients with non-negative constraints. However, as an unsupervised method, the original NMF cannot utilize the discriminative class information. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised class-driven NMF method to associate a class label with each basis vector by introducing an inhomogeneous representation cost constraint. This constraint forces the learned basis vectors to represent better for their own classes but worse for the others. Therefore, data samples in the same class will have similar representations, and consequently the discriminability in new representations could be boosted. Some experiments carried out on several standard databases validate the effectiveness of our method in comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches.