Partial Multi-label Learning with Label and Feature Collaboration
College of Comp. & Inf. Sci., Southwest University（计算机与信息科学学院，西南大学）；College of Elec. & Inf. Eng., Beijing Univ. of Civil Eng. and Arch.（电子与信息工程学院，北京建筑大学）
Partial multi-label learning (PML) models the scenario where each training instance is annotated with a set of candidate labels, and only some of the labels are relevant. The PML problem is practical in real-world scenarios, as it is difficult and even impossible to obtain precisely labeled samples. Several PML solutions have been proposed to combat with the prone misled by the irrelevant labels concealed in the candidate labels, but they generally focus on the smoothness assumption in feature space or low-rank assumption in label space, while ignore the negative information between features and labels. Specifically, if two instances have largely overlapped candidate labels, irrespective of their feature similarity, their ground-truth labels should be similar; while if they are dissimilar in the feature and candidate label space, their ground-truth labels should be dissimilar with each other. To achieve a credible predictor on PML data, we propose a novel approach called PML-LFC (Partial Multi-label Learning with Label and Feature Collaboration). PML-LFC estimates the confidence values of relevant labels for each instance using the similarity from both the label and feature spaces, and trains the desired predictor with the estimated confidence values. PML-LFC achieves the predictor and the latent label matrix in a reciprocal reinforce manner by a unified model, and develops an alternative optimization procedure to optimize them. Extensive empirical study on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates the superiority of PML-LFC.
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba-NTU Singapore Joint Research Institute（阿里巴巴-南洋理工新加坡联合研究院）；Southwest University（西南大学）
It is well-known that exploiting label correlations is crucially important to multi-label learning. Most of the existing approaches take label correlations as prior knowledge, which may not correctly characterize the real relationships among labels. Besides, label correlations are normally used to regularize the hypothesis space, while the final predictions are not explicitly correlated. In this paper, we suggest that for each individual label, the final prediction involves the collaboration between its own prediction and the predictions of other labels. Based on this assumption, we first prop…
Center for Vision Technologies, SRI International（SRI国际视觉技术中心）；Center for Education Research and Innovation, SRI International（SRI国际教育研究与创新中心）
K-12 classrooms consistently integrate collaboration as part of their learning experiences. However, owing to large classroom sizes, teachers do not have the time to properly assess each student and give them feedback. In this paper we propose using simple deep-learning-based machine learning models to automatically determine the overall collaboration quality of a group based on annotations of individual roles and individual level behavior of all the students in the group. We come across the following challenges when building these models: 1) Limited training data, 2) Severe class label imbala…
Partial label (PL) learning tackles the problem where each training instance is associated with a set of candidate labels that include both the true label and irrelevant noise labels. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-level generative model for partial label learning (MGPLL), which tackles the problem by learning both a label level adversarial generator and a feature level adversarial generator under a bi-directional mapping framework between the label vectors and the data samples. Specifically, MGPLL uses a conditional noise label generation network to model the non-random noise labels …
Programmatic weak supervision creates models without hand-labeled training data by combining the outputs of heuristic labelers. Existing frameworks make the restrictive assumption that labelers output a single class label. Enabling users to create partial labelers that output subsets of possible class labels would greatly expand the expressivity of programmatic weak supervision. We introduce this capability by defining a probabilistic generative model that can estimate the underlying accuracies of multiple noisy partial labelers without ground truth labels. We show how to scale up learning, fo…
Partial multi-label learning (PML), which tackles the problem of learning multi-label prediction models from instances with overcomplete noisy annotations, has recently started gaining attention from the research community. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial learning model, PML-GAN, under a generalized encoder-decoder framework for partial multi-label learning. The PML-GAN model uses a disambiguation network to identify noisy labels and uses a multi-label prediction network to map the training instances to the disambiguated label vectors, while deploying a generative adversarial net…
In this paper, we propose online algorithms for multiclass classification using partial labels. We propose two variants of Perceptron called Avg Perceptron and Max Perceptron to deal with the partial labeled data. We also propose Avg Pegasos and Max Pegasos, which are extensions of Pegasos algorithm. We also provide mistake bounds for Avg Perceptron and regret bound for Avg Pegasos. We show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches by experimenting on various datasets and comparing them with the standard Perceptron and Pegasos.
Jilin University（吉林大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）
Partial Multi-label Learning (PML) aims to induce the multi-label predictor from datasets with noisy supervision, where each training instance is associated with several candidate labels but only partially valid. To address the noisy issue, the existing PML methods basically recover the ground-truth labels by leveraging the ground-truth confidence of the candidate label, \ie the likelihood of a candidate label being a ground-truth one. However, they neglect the information from non-candidate labels, which potentially contributes to the ground-truth label recovery. In this paper, we propose to …
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba-NTU Singapore Joint Research Institute（阿里巴巴-新加坡南洋理工大学联合研究院）
Partial label learning deals with the problem where each training instance is assigned a set of candidate labels, only one of which is correct. This paper provides the first attempt to leverage the idea of self-training for dealing with partially labeled examples. Specifically, we propose a unified formulation with proper constraints to train the desired model and perform pseudo-labeling jointly. For pseudo-labeling, unlike traditional self-training that manually differentiates the ground-truth label with enough high confidence, we introduce the maximum infinity norm regularization on the mode…
The cost and scarcity of fully supervised labels in statistical machine learning encourage using partially labeled data for model validation as a cheaper and more accessible alternative. Effectively collecting and leveraging weakly supervised data for large-space structured prediction tasks thus becomes an important part of an end-to-end learning system. We propose a new computationally-friendly methodology to construct predictive sets using only partially labeled data on top of black-box predictive models. To do so, we introduce "probe" functions as a way to describe weakly supervised instanc…
Heinz Nixdorf Institute and Department of Computer Science（海因茨·尼多夫研究所及计算机科学系）；Paderborn University, Germany（帕德博恩大学（德国））
In contrast to conventional (single-label) classification, the setting of multilabel classification (MLC) allows an instance to belong to several classes simultaneously. Thus, instead of selecting a single class label, predictions take the form of a subset of all labels. In this paper, we study an extension of the setting of MLC, in which the learner is allowed to partially abstain from a prediction, that is, to deliver predictions on some but not necessarily all class labels. We propose a formalization of MLC with abstention in terms of a generalized loss minimization problem and present firs…
Partial Label Learning (PLL) aims to learn from the data where each training instance is associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only one is correct. Most existing methods deal with such problem by either treating each candidate label equally or identifying the ground-truth label iteratively. In this paper, we propose a novel PLL approach called HERA, which simultaneously incorporates the HeterogEneous Loss and the SpaRse and Low-rAnk procedure to estimate the labeling confidence for each instance while training the model. Specifically, the heterogeneous loss integrates the stre…
Learnability with Partial Labels and Adaptive Nearest Neighbors
Basque Center for Applied Mathematics（巴斯克应用数学中心）；Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science（Ikerbasque，巴斯克科学基金会）；University of the Basque Country, Spain（巴斯克国家大学，西班牙）；University of California San Diego, USA（加州大学圣地亚哥分校，美国）
School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学计算机与信息技术学院）
Partial Label Learning (PLL) aims to learn from the data where each training example is associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only one is correct. The key to deal with such problem is to disambiguate the candidate label sets and obtain the correct assignments between instances and their candidate labels. In this paper, we interpret such assignments as instance-to-label matchings, and reformulate the task of PLL as a matching selection problem. To model such problem, we propose a novel Graph Matching based Partial Label Learning (GM-PLL) framework, where Graph Matching (GM) sch…
Southeast University（东南大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所革新智能综合研究中心）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Tokyo（东京大学）
Partial-label learning (PLL) is a typical weakly supervised learning problem, where each training instance is equipped with a set of candidate labels among which only one is the true label. Most existing methods elaborately designed learning objectives as constrained optimizations that must be solved in specific manners, making their computational complexity a bottleneck for scaling up to big data. The goal of this paper is to propose a novel framework of PLL with flexibility on the model and optimization algorithm. More specifically, we propose a novel estimator of the classification risk, th…
A comparative analysis of rank aggregation methods for the partial label ranking problem
Laboratorio de Sistemas Inteligentes y Minería de Datos, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain（智能系统与数据挖掘实验室，卡斯蒂利亚-拉曼查大学，阿尔巴塞特，西班牙）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Kaiserslautern, Germany（德国人工智能研究中心，凯泽斯劳滕，德国）
Partial label learning (PLL) aims to solve the problem where each training instance is associated with a set of candidate labels, one of which is the correct label. Most PLL algorithms try to disambiguate the candidate label set, by either simply treating each candidate label equally or iteratively identifying the true label. Nonetheless, existing algorithms usually treat all labels and instances equally, and the complexities of both labels and instances are not taken into consideration during the learning stage. Inspired by the successful application of self-paced learning strategy in machine…
Due to the high human cost of annotation, it is non-trivial to curate a large-scale medical dataset that is fully labeled for all classes of interest. Instead, it would be convenient to collect multiple small partially labeled datasets from different matching sources, where the medical images may have only been annotated for a subset of classes of interest. This paper offers an empirical understanding of an under-explored problem, namely partially supervised multi-label classification (PSMLC), where a multi-label classifier is trained with only partially labeled medical images. In contrast to …
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；RIKEN AIP（理化学研究所人工智能研究中心）
Partial-label learning is a kind of weakly-supervised learning with inexact labels, where for each training example, we are given a set of candidate labels instead of only one true label. Recently, various approaches on partial-label learning have been proposed under different generation models of candidate label sets. However, these methods require relatively strong distributional assumptions on the generation models. When the assumptions do not hold, the performance of the methods is not guaranteed theoretically. In this paper, we propose the notion of properness on partial labels. We show t…
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；NLPR, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）
Partial-label learning (PLL) is an important branch of weakly supervised learning where the single ground truth resides in a set of candidate labels, while the research rarely considers the label imbalance. A recent study for imbalanced partial-Label learning proposed that the combinatorial challenge of partial-label learning and long-tail learning lies in matching between a decent marginal prior distribution with drawing the pseudo labels. However, we believe that even if the pseudo label matches the prior distribution, the tail classes will still be difficult to learn because the total weigh…
Weakly supervised machine learning algorithms are able to learn from ambiguous samples or labels, e.g., multi-instance learning or partial-label learning. However, in some real-world tasks, each training sample is associated with not only multiple instances but also a candidate label set that contains one ground-truth label and some false positive labels. Specifically, at least one instance pertains to the ground-truth label while no instance belongs to the false positive labels. In this paper, we formalize such problems as multi-instance partial-label learning (MIPL). Existing multi-instance …
INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Département d’Informatique de l’École Normale Supérieure（巴黎高等师范学院计算机系）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）
Annotating datasets is one of the main costs in nowadays supervised learning. The goal of weak supervision is to enable models to learn using only forms of labelling which are cheaper to collect, as partial labelling. This is a type of incomplete annotation where, for each datapoint, supervision is cast as a set of labels containing the real one. The problem of supervised learning with partial labelling has been studied for specific instances such as classification, multi-label, ranking or segmentation, but a general framework is still missing. This paper provides a unified framework based on …
We propose a new approach to address the text classification problems when learning with partial labels is beneficial. Instead of offering each training sample a set of candidate labels, we assign negative-oriented labels to the ambiguous training examples if they are unlikely fall into certain classes. We construct our new maximum likelihood estimators with self-correction property, and prove that under some conditions, our estimators converge faster. Also we discuss the advantages of applying one of our estimator to a fully supervised learning problem. The proposed method has potential appli…
Exploiting Conjugate Label Information for Multi-Instance Partial-Label Learning
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Key Lab. of Computer Network and Information Integration (Southeast University), MoE, China（教育部计算机网络与信息集成重点实验室（东南大学））；School of Information and Physical Sciences, The University of Newcastle（纽卡斯尔大学信息与物理科学学院）
University of Twente（特文特大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Samsung Research China-Beijing（三星中国研究院-北京）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）
As an important branch of weakly supervised learning, partial label learning deals with data where each instance is assigned with a set of candidate labels, whereas only one of them is true. Despite many methodology studies on learning from partial labels, there still lacks theoretical understandings of their risk consistent properties under relatively weak assumptions, especially on the link between theoretical results and the empirical choice of parameters. In this paper, we propose a family of loss functions named \textit{Leveraged Weighted} (LW) loss, which for the first time introduces th…
Reconsidering Feature Structure Information and Latent Space Alignment in Partial Multi-label Feature Selection
College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University（吉林大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Jilin University（吉林大学符号计算与知识工程教育部重点实验室）；Department of Computer Science, Portland State University（波特兰州立大学计算机科学系）
Partial label learning (PLL) is a typical weakly supervised learning problem, where each training example is associated with a set of candidate labels among which only one is true. Most existing PLL approaches assume that the incorrect labels in each training example are randomly picked as the candidate labels. However, this assumption is not realistic since the candidate labels are always instance-dependent. In this paper, we consider instance-dependent PLL and assume that each example is associated with a latent label distribution constituted by the real number of each label, representing th…
College of Computer Science, Chongqing University（重庆大学计算机学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Existing partial sequence labeling models mainly focus on max-margin framework which fails to provide an uncertainty estimation of the prediction. Further, the unique ground truth disambiguation strategy employed by these models may include wrong label information for parameter learning. In this paper, we propose structured Gaussian Processes for partial sequence labeling (SGPPSL), which encodes uncertainty in the prediction and does not need extra effort for model selection and hyperparameter learning. The model employs factor-as-piece approximation that divides the linear-chain graph structu…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）
Partial label learning (PLL) is an important problem that allows each training example to be labeled with a coarse candidate set, which well suits many real-world data annotation scenarios with label ambiguity. Despite the promise, the performance of PLL often lags behind the supervised counterpart. In this work, we bridge the gap by addressing two key research challenges in PLL -- representation learning and label disambiguation -- in one coherent framework. Specifically, our proposed framework PiCO consists of a contrastive learning module along with a novel class prototype-based label disam…
College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University（吉林大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of MOE, Jilin University（吉林大学符号计算与知识工程教育部重点实验室）；College of Information Science and Technology, Northeast Normal University（东北师范大学信息科学与技术学院）；Key Laboratory of Applied Statistics of MOE, Northeast Normal University（东北师范大学应用统计教育部重点实验室）
Partial Label (PL) learning refers to the task of learning from the partially labeled data, where each training instance is ambiguously equipped with a set of candidate labels but only one is valid. Advances in the recent deep PL learning literature have shown that the deep learning paradigms, e.g., self-training, contrastive learning, or class activate values, can achieve promising performance. Inspired by the impressive success of deep Semi-Supervised (SS) learning, we transform the PL learning problem into the SS learning problem, and propose a novel PL learning method, namely Partial Label…
Partial label learning is a type of weakly supervised learning, where each training instance corresponds to a set of candidate labels, among which only one is true. In this paper, we introduce ProPaLL, a novel probabilistic approach to this problem, which has at least three advantages compared to the existing approaches: it simplifies the training process, improves performance, and can be applied to any deep architecture. Experiments conducted on artificial and real-world datasets indicate that ProPaLL outperforms the existing approaches.
Partial label learning (PLL) is a typical weakly supervised learning problem, where each training example is associated with a set of candidate labels among which only one is true. Most existing PLL approaches assume that the incorrect labels in each training example are randomly picked as the candidate labels and model the generation process of the candidate labels in a simple way. However, these approaches usually do not perform as well as expected due to the fact that the generation process of the candidate labels is always instance-dependent. Therefore, it deserves to be modeled in a refin…
From Ambiguity to Action: A POMDP Perspective on Partial Multi-Label Ambiguity and Its Horizon-One Resolution
College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, China（吉林大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Jilin University, China（教育部符号计算与知识工程重点实验室）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Amazon AI（亚马逊人工智能）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
While many active learning papers assume that the learner can simply ask for a label and receive it, real annotation often presents a mismatch between the form of a label (say, one among many classes), and the form of an annotation (typically yes/no binary feedback). To annotate examples corpora for multiclass classification, we might need to ask multiple yes/no questions, exploiting a label hierarchy if one is available. To address this more realistic setting, we propose active learning with partial feedback (ALPF), where the learner must actively choose both which example to label and which …
Feature-Label Modal Alignment for Robust Partial Multi-Label Learning
School of Automation, Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学自动化学院）；Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Visual Object Detection and Recognition, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）深圳市视觉目标检测与识别重点实验室）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）
Partial-label learning (PLL) is a peculiar weakly-supervised learning task where the training samples are generally associated with a set of candidate labels instead of single ground truth. While a variety of label disambiguation methods have been proposed in this domain, they normally assume a class-balanced scenario that may not hold in many real-world applications. Empirically, we observe degenerated performance of the prior methods when facing the combinatorial challenge from the long-tailed distribution and partial-labeling. In this work, we first identify the major reasons that the prior…
Many NLP learning tasks can be decomposed into several distinct sub-tasks, each associated with a partial label. In this paper we focus on a popular class of learning problems, sequence prediction applied to several sentiment analysis tasks, and suggest a modular learning approach in which different sub-tasks are learned using separate functional modules, combined to perform the final task while sharing information. Our experiments show this approach helps constrain the learning process and can alleviate some of the supervision efforts.
College of Software Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学软件学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Yam Pak Charitable Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences, Saint Francis University（圣弗朗西斯大学叶荫堂计算与信息科学学院）；Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）
