Multi-label classification (MLC) allows complex dependencies among labels, making it more suitable to model many real-world problems. However, data annotation for training MLC models becomes much more labor-intensive due to the correlated (hence non-exclusive) labels and a potentially large and sparse label space.

Deep learning models frequently encounter feature uncertainty in diverse learning scenarios, significantly impacting their performance and reliability. This challenge is particularly complex in multi-modal scenarios, where models must integrate information from different sources with inherent uncertainties. We propose Dynamic Uncertainty-Aware Learning (DUAL), a unified framework that effectively handles feature uncertainty in both single-modal and multi-modal scenarios. DUAL introduces three key innovations: Dynamic Feature Uncertainty Modeling, which continuously refines uncertainty estimates through joint consideration of feature characteristics and learning dynamics; Adaptive Distribution-Aware Modulation, which maintains balanced feature distributions through dynamic sample influence adjustment; and Uncertainty-aware Cross-Modal Relationship Learning, which explicitly models uncertainties in cross-modal interactions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate DUAL's effectiveness across multiple domains: in computer vision tasks, it achieves substantial improvements of 7.1% accuracy on CIFAR-10, 6.5% accuracy on CIFAR-100, and 2.3% accuracy on Tiny-ImageNet; in multi-modal learning, it demonstrates consistent gains of 4.1% accuracy on CMU-MOSEI and 2.8% accuracy on CMU-MOSI for sentiment analysis, while achieving 1.4% accuracy improvements on MISR. The code will be available on GitHub soon.

In this study, we examine a clustering problem in which the covariates of each individual element in a dataset are associated with an uncertainty specific to that element. More specifically, we consider a clustering approach in which a pre-processing applying a non-linear transformation to the covariates is used to capture the hidden data structure. To this end, we approximate the sets representing the propagated uncertainty for the pre-processed features empirically. To exploit the empirical uncertainty sets, we propose a greedy and optimistic clustering (GOC) algorithm that finds better feature candidates over such sets, yielding more condensed clusters. As an important application, we apply the GOC algorithm to synthetic datasets of the orbital properties of stars generated through our numerical simulation mimicking the formation process of the Milky Way. The GOC algorithm demonstrates an improved performance in finding sibling stars originating from the same dwarf galaxy. These realistic datasets have also been made publicly available.

With the wide development of black-box machine learning algorithms, particularly deep neural network (DNN), the practical demand for the reliability assessment is rapidly rising. On the basis of the concept that `Bayesian deep learning knows what it does not know,' the uncertainty of DNN outputs has been investigated as a reliability measure for the classification and regression tasks. However, in the image-caption retrieval task, well-known samples are not always easy-to-retrieve samples. This study investigates two aspects of image-caption embedding-and-retrieval systems. On one hand, we quantify feature uncertainty by considering image-caption embedding as a regression task, and use it for model averaging, which can improve the retrieval performance. On the other hand, we further quantify posterior uncertainty by considering the retrieval as a classification task, and use it as a reliability measure, which can greatly improve the retrieval performance by rejecting uncertain queries. The consistent performance of two uncertainty measures is observed with different datasets (MS COCO and Flickr30k), different deep learning architectures (dropout and batch normalization), and different similarity functions.

We consider the binary classification problem when data are large and subject to unknown but bounded uncertainties. We address the problem by formulating the nonlinear support vector machine training problem with robust optimization. To do so, we analyze and propose two bounding schemes for uncertainties associated to random approximate features in low dimensional spaces. The proposed techniques are based on Random Fourier Features and the Nystr\"om methods. The resulting formulations can be solved with efficient stochastic approximation techniques such as stochastic (sub)-gradient, stochastic proximal gradient techniques or their variants.