School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学计算机科学系）；The University of Queensland, Australia（昆士兰大学）；Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, RIKEN（理化学研究所高级智能项目中心）；The University of Tokyo, Japan（东京大学）
Lei Feng, Jiaqi Lv, Bo Han, Miao Xu, Gang Niu, Xin Geng, Bo An, Masashi Sugiyama
Partial-label learning (PLL) is a multi-class classification problem, where each training example is associated with a set of candidate labels. Even though many practical PLL methods have been proposed in the last two decades, there lacks a theoretical understanding of the consistency of those methods-none of the PLL methods hitherto possesses a generation process of candidate label sets, and then it is still unclear why such a method works on a specific dataset and when it may fail given a different dataset. In this paper, we propose the first generation model of candidate label sets, and develop two novel PLL methods that are guaranteed to be provably consistent, i.e., one is risk-consistent and the other is classifier-consistent. Our methods are advantageous, since they are compatible with any deep network or stochastic optimizer. Furthermore, thanks to the generation model, we would be able to answer the two questions above by testing if the generation model matches given candidate label sets. Experiments on benchmark and real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed generation model and two PLL methods.
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；RIKEN AIP（日本理化学研究所创新智能综合研究中心）；University of Tokyo（东京大学）
In label-noise learning, the transition matrix plays a key role in building statistically consistent classifiers. Existing consistent estimators for the transition matrix have been developed by exploiting anchor points. However, the anchor-point assumption is not always satisfied in real scenarios. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework for solving label-noise learning without anchor points, in which we simultaneously optimize two objectives: the cross entropy loss between the noisy label and the predicted probability by the neural network, and the volume of the simplex formed by th…
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.
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…
University of California, Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Modern neural networks are typically trained in an over-parameterized regime where the parameters of the model far exceed the size of the training data. Such neural networks in principle have the capacity to (over)fit any set of labels including pure noise. Despite this, somewhat paradoxically, neural network models trained via first-order methods continue to predict well on yet unseen test data. This paper takes a step towards demystifying this phenomena. Under a rich dataset model, we show that gradient descent is provably robust to noise/corruption on a constant fraction of the labels despi…
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 …
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…
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；Norton Research Group（诺顿研究集团）
Evasion attack in multi-label learning systems is an interesting, widely witnessed, yet rarely explored research topic. Characterizing the crucial factors determining the attackability of the multi-label adversarial threat is the key to interpret the origin of the adversarial vulnerability and to understand how to mitigate it. Our study is inspired by the theory of adversarial risk bound. We associate the attackability of a targeted multi-label classifier with the regularity of the classifier and the training data distribution. Beyond the theoretical attackability analysis, we further propose …
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…
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…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are capable of perfectly fitting the training data, including memorizing noisy data. It is commonly believed that memorization hurts generalization. Therefore, many recent works propose mitigation strategies to avoid noisy data or correct memorization. In this work, we step back and ask the question: Can deep learning be robust against massive label noise without any mitigation? We provide an affirmative answer for the case of symmetric label noise: We find that certain DNNs, including under-parameterized and over-parameterized models, can tolerate massive symmetric…
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…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Duke University（杜克大学）
Multi-label classification, which predicts a set of labels for an input, has many applications. However, multiple recent studies showed that multi-label classification is vulnerable to adversarial examples. In particular, an attacker can manipulate the labels predicted by a multi-label classifier for an input via adding carefully crafted, human-imperceptible perturbation to it. Existing provable defenses for multi-class classification achieve sub-optimal provable robustness guarantees when generalized to multi-label classification. In this work, we propose MultiGuard, the first provably robust…
Music structure analysis (MSA) systems aim to segment a song recording into non-overlapping sections with useful labels. Previous MSA systems typically predict abstract labels in a post-processing step and require the full context of the song. By contrast, we recently proposed a supervised framework, called "Music Structural Function Analysis" (MuSFA), that models and predicts meaningful labels like 'verse' and 'chorus' directly from audio, without requiring the full context of a song. However, the performance of this system depends on the amount and quality of training data. In this paper, we…
In overparametrized models, the noise in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) implicitly regularizes the optimization trajectory and determines which local minimum SGD converges to. Motivated by empirical studies that demonstrate that training with noisy labels improves generalization, we study the implicit regularization effect of SGD with label noise. We show that SGD with label noise converges to a stationary point of a regularized loss $L(θ) +λR(θ)$, where $L(θ)$ is the training loss, $λ$ is an effective regularization parameter depending on the step size, strength of the label noise, and the…
We prove a new upper bound on the generalization gap of classifiers that are obtained by first using self-supervision to learn a representation $r$ of the training data, and then fitting a simple (e.g., linear) classifier $g$ to the labels. Specifically, we show that (under the assumptions described below) the generalization gap of such classifiers tends to zero if $\mathsf{C}(g) \ll n$, where $\mathsf{C}(g)$ is an appropriately-defined measure of the simple classifier $g$'s complexity, and $n$ is the number of training samples. We stress that our bound is independent of the complexity of the …
Federated learning enables clients to collaboratively learn a shared global model without sharing their local training data with a cloud server. However, malicious clients can corrupt the global model to predict incorrect labels for testing examples. Existing defenses against malicious clients leverage Byzantine-robust federated learning methods. However, these methods cannot provably guarantee that the predicted label for a testing example is not affected by malicious clients. We bridge this gap via ensemble federated learning. In particular, given any base federated learning algorithm, we us…
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 …
3D point cloud classification has many safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and robotic grasping. However, several studies showed that it is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In particular, an attacker can make a classifier predict an incorrect label for a 3D point cloud via carefully modifying, adding, and/or deleting a small number of its points. Randomized smoothing is state-of-the-art technique to build certifiably robust 2D image classifiers. However, when applied to 3D point cloud classification, randomized smoothing can only certify robustness against adversarially m…
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…
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 …
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…
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 a…
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…
Under label shift, the label distribution p(y) might change but the class-conditional distributions p(x|y) do not. There are two dominant approaches for estimating the label marginal. BBSE, a moment-matching approach based on confusion matrices, is provably consistent and provides interpretable error bounds. However, a maximum likelihood estimation approach, which we call MLLS, dominates empirically. In this paper, we present a unified view of the two methods and the first theoretical characterization of MLLS. Our contributions include (i) consistency conditions for MLLS, which include calibra…
Stress-Testing Neural Network Verifiers with Provably Robust Instances
Department of Statistics & Data Science, University of California, Los Angeles（统计与数据科学系，加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Department of Mathematics, University of California, Los Angeles（数学系，加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig（科学数学研究所，莱比锡）
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…
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…
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…
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）
