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InstanT: Semi-supervised Learning with Instance-dependent Thresholds

Neural Information Processing Systems

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has been a fundamental challenge in machine learning for decades. The primary family of SSL algorithms, known as pseudo-labeling, involves assigning pseudo-labels to confident unlabeled instances and incorporating them into the training set. Therefore, the selection criteria of confident instances are crucial to the success of SSL. Recently, there has been growing interest in the development of SSL methods that use dynamic or adaptive thresholds. Yet, these methods typically apply the same threshold to all samples, or use class-dependent thresholds for instances belonging to a certain class, while neglecting instance-level information. In this paper, we propose the study of instance-dependent thresholds, which has the highest degree of freedom compared with existing methods. Specifically, we devise a novel instance-dependent threshold function for all unlabeled instances by utilizing their instance-level ambiguity and the instance-dependent error rates of pseudo-labels, so instances that are more likely to have incorrect pseudo-labels will have higher thresholds. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our instance-dependent threshold function provides a bounded probabilistic guarantee for the correctness of the pseudo-labels it assigns.


Beyond Augmented-Action Surrogates for Multi-Expert Learning-to-Defer

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Existing multi-expert learning-to-defer surrogates are statistically consistent, yet they can underfit, suppress useful experts, or degrade as the expert pool grows. We trace these failures to a shared architectural choice: casting classes and experts as actions inside one augmented prediction geometry. Consistency governs the population target; it says nothing about how the surrogate distributes gradient mass during training. We analyze five surrogates along both axes and show that each trades a fix on one for a failure on the other. We then introduce a decoupled surrogate that estimates the class posterior with a softmax and each expert utility with an independent sigmoid. It admits an $\mathcal{H}$-consistency bound whose constant is $J$-independent for fixed per-expert weight $ฮฒ{=}ฮป/J$, and its gradients are free of the amplification, starvation, and coupling pathologies of the augmented family. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-10H, and Covertype confirm that the decoupled surrogate is the only method that avoids amplification under redundancy, preserves rare specialists, and consistently improves over a standalone classifier across all settings.





Estimating Noise Transition Matrix with Label Correlations for Noisy Multi-Label Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

In label-noise learning, the noise transition matrix, bridging the class posterior for noisy and clean data, has been widely exploited to learn statistically consistent classifiers. The effectiveness of these algorithms relies heavily on estimating the transition matrix. Recently, the problem of label-noise learning in multi-label classification has received increasing attention, and these consistent algorithms can be applied in multi-label cases. However, the estimation of transition matrices in noisy multi-label learning has not been studied and remains challenging, since most of the existing estimators in noisy multi-class learning depend on the existence of anchor points and the accurate fitting of noisy class posterior. To address this problem, in this paper, we first study the identifiability problem of the class-dependent transition matrix in noisy multi-label learning, and then inspired by the identifiability results, we propose a new estimator by exploiting label correlations without neither anchor points nor accurate fitting of noisy class posterior. Specifically, we estimate the occurrence probability of two noisy labels to get noisy label correlations. Then, we perform sample selection to further extract information that implies clean label correlations, which is used to estimate the occurrence probability of one noisy label when a certain clean label appears. By utilizing the mismatch of label correlations implied in these occurrence probabilities, the transition matrix is identifiable, and can then be acquired by solving a simple bilinear decomposition problem. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our estimator to estimate the transition matrix with label correlations, leading to better classification performance.


Dual T: Reducing Estimation Error for Transition Matrix in Label-noise Learning Y u Y ao

Neural Information Processing Systems

The transition matrix, denoting the transition relationship from clean labels to noisy labels, is essential to build statistically consistent classifiers in label-noise learning.




Uncertainty-aware Bayesian machine learning modelling of land cover classification

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Land cover classification involves the production of land cover maps, which determine the type of land through remote sensing imagery. Over recent years, such classification is being performed by machine learning classification models, which can give highly accurate predictions on land cover per pixel using large quantities of input training data. However, such models do not currently take account of input measurement uncertainty, which is vital for traceability in metrology. In this work we propose a Bayesian classification framework using generative modelling to take account of input measurement uncertainty. We take the specific case of Bayesian quadratic discriminant analysis, and apply it to land cover datasets from Copernicus Sentinel-2 in 2020 and 2021. We benchmark the performance of the model against more popular classification models used in land cover maps such as random forests and neural networks. We find that such Bayesian models are more trustworthy, in the sense that they are more interpretable, explicitly model the input measurement uncertainty, and maintain predictive performance of class probability outputs across datasets of different years and sizes, whilst also being computationally efficient.