In partial multi-label learning (PML), each training example is associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only some labels are valid. As a common strategy to tackle PML problem, disambiguation aims to recover the ground-truth labeling information from such inaccurate annotations. However, existing approaches mainly rely on heuristics or ad-hoc rules to disambiguate candidate labels, which may not be universal enough in complicated real-world scenarios. To provide a principled way for disambiguation, we make a first attempt to explore the probabilistic graphical model for PML problem, where a directed graph is tailored to infer latent ground-truth labeling information from the generative process of partial multi-label data. Under the framework of stochastic gradient variational Bayes, a unified variational lower bound is derived for this graphical model, which is further relaxed probabilistically so that the desired prediction model can be induced with simultaneously identified ground-truth labeling information. Comprehensive experiments on multiple synthetic and real-world data sets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts.

Partial multi-label learning aims to induce a multi-label predictor from inaccurately annotated examples, where a set of candidate labels is assigned to each training example but only some of thesecandidateonesarevalid.

In partial multi-label learning (PML), each training example is associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only some labels are valid. As a common strategy to tackle PML problem, disambiguation aims to recover the ground-truth labeling information from such inaccurate annotations. However, existing approaches mainly rely on heuristics or ad-hoc rules to disambiguate candidate labels, which may not be universal enough in complicated real-world scenarios. To provide a principled way for disambiguation, we make a first attempt to explore the probabilistic graphical model for PML problem, where a directed graph is tailored to infer latent ground-truth labeling information from the generative process of partial multi-label data. Under the framework of stochastic gradient variational Bayes, a unified variational lower bound is derived for this graphical model, which is further relaxed probabilistically so that the desired prediction model can be induced with simultaneously identified ground-truth labeling information. Comprehensive experiments on multiple synthetic and real-world data sets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts.

JOURNAL OF L A T EX CLASS FILES, VOL. 18, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2024 1 Exploring Partial Multi-Label Learning via Integrating Semantic Co-occurrence Knowledge Xin Wu, Fei Teng, Y ue Feng, Kaibo Shi, Zhuosheng Lin, Ji Zhang and James Wang Abstract --Partial multi-label learning aims to extract knowledge from incompletely annotated data, which includes known correct labels, known incorrect labels, and unknown labels. The core challenge lies in accurately identifying the ambiguous relationships between labels and instances. In this paper, we emphasize that matching co-occurrence patterns between labels and instances is key to addressing this challenge. T o this end, we propose Semantic Co-occurrence Insight Network (SCINet), a novel and effective framework for partial multi-label learning. Specifically, SCINet introduces a bi-dominant prompter module, which leverages an off-the-shelf multimodal model to capture text-image correlations and enhance semantic alignment. T o reinforce instance-label interdependencies, we develop a cross-modality fusion module that jointly models inter-label correlations, inter-instance relationships, and co-occurrence patterns across instance-label assignments. Moreover, we propose an intrinsic semantic augmentation strategy that enhances the model's understanding of intrinsic data semantics by applying diverse image transformations, thereby fostering a synergistic relationship between label confidence and sample difficulty. Extensive experiments on four widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCINet surpasses state-of-the-art methods. I NTRODUCTION M UL TI-LABEL learning has demonstrated tremendous potential in fields. However, due to the high cost of labeling and the subjectivity of annotators, real-world datasets often suffer from incomplete and noisy labels. This challenge has spurred the exploration of partial multi-label learning methods aimed at addressing these issues more effectively. Consequently, driven by this research need, partial multi-label learning has garnered vibrant attention in machine learning [1], [2]. It represents a new paradigm for multi-label recognition This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.62272398), Sichuan Science and Technology Program (No.2024NSFJQ0019).

The "Curse of dimensionality" is prevalent across various data patterns, which increases the risk of model overfitting and leads to a decline in model classification performance. However, few studies have focused on this issue in Partial Multi-label Learning (PML), where each sample is associated with a set of candidate labels, at least one of which is correct. Existing PML methods addressing this problem are mainly based on the low-rank assumption. However, low-rank assumption is difficult to be satisfied in practical situations and may lead to loss of high-dimensional information. Furthermore, we find that existing methods have poor ability to identify positive labels, which is important in real-world scenarios. In this paper, a PML feature selection method is proposed considering two important characteristics of dataset: label relationship's noise-resistance and label connectivity. Our proposed method utilizes label relationship's noise-resistance to disambiguate labels. Then the learning process is designed through the reformed low-rank assumption. Finally, representative labels are found through label connectivity, and the weight matrix is reconstructed to select features with strong identification ability to these labels. The experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

Partial Multi-Label Learning (PML) extends the multi-label learning paradigm to scenarios where each sample is associated with a candidate label set containing both ground-truth labels and noisy labels. Existing PML methods commonly rely on two assumptions: sparsity of the noise label matrix and low-rankness of the ground-truth label matrix. However, these assumptions are inherently conflicting and impractical for real-world scenarios, where the true label matrix is typically full-rank or close to full-rank. To address these limitations, we demonstrate that the sparsity constraint contributes to the high-rank property of the predicted label matrix. Based on this, we propose a novel method Schirn, which introduces a sparsity constraint on the noise label matrix while enforcing a high-rank property on the predicted label matrix. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of Schirn compared to state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness in tackling real-world PML challenges.