--Existing multi-media retrieval models either rely on creating a common subspace with modality-specific representation models or require schema mapping among modalities to measure similarities among multi-media data. Our goal is to avoid the annotation overhead incurred from considering retrieval as a supervised classification task and re-use the pre-trained encoders in large language models and vision tasks. We propose "FemmIR", a framework to retrieve multimodal results relevant to information needs expressed with multimodal queries by example without any similarity label. Such identification is necessary for real-world applications where data annotations are scarce and satisfactory performance is required without fine-tuning with a common framework across applications. We curate a new dataset called MuQNOL for benchmarking progress on this task. Our technique is based on weak supervision introduced through edit distance between samples: graph edit distance can be modified to consider the cost of replacing a data sample in terms of its properties, and relevance can be measured through the implicit signal from the amount of edit cost among the objects. Unlike metric learning or encoding networks, FemmIR re-uses the high-level properties and maintains the property-value and relationship constraints with a multi-level interaction score between data samples and the query example provided by the user . We also proposed a novel attribute recognition model from unstructured text "HART" that can identify attributes without finetuning or large language models. We empirically evaluate FemmIR and HART on a missing person use-case with MuQNOL. HART successfully identifies human attributes from large unstructured text without additional training, while FemmIR performs comparably to similar retrieval systems in delivering on-demand retrieval results with exact and approximate similarities while using the existing property identifiers in the system. With the influx of multimedia data sources, comparing data from different modalities to grasp a more informed decision for any phenomenon has become increasingly difficult.

Partial-Label Learning (PLL) is a typical problem of weakly supervised learning, where each training instance is annotated with a set of candidate labels. Self-training PLL models achieve state-of-the-art performance but suffer from error accumulation problem caused by mistakenly disambiguated instances. Although co-training can alleviate this issue by training two networks simultaneously and allowing them to interact with each other, most existing co-training methods train two structurally identical networks with the same task, i.e., are symmetric, rendering it insufficient for them to correct each other due to their similar limitations. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an asymmetric dual-task co-training PLL model called AsyCo, which forces its two networks, i.e., a disambiguation network and an auxiliary network, to learn from different views explicitly by optimizing distinct tasks. Specifically, the disambiguation network is trained with self-training PLL task to learn label confidence, while the auxiliary network is trained in a supervised learning paradigm to learn from the noisy pairwise similarity labels that are constructed according to the learned label confidence. Finally, the error accumulation problem is mitigated via information distillation and confidence refinement. Extensive experiments on both uniform and instance-dependent partially labeled datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AsyCo. The code is available at https://github.com/libeibeics/AsyCo.

Label noise is ubiquitous in the era of big data. Deep learning algorithms can easily fit the noise and thus cannot generalize well without properly modeling the noise. In this paper, we propose a new perspective on dealing with label noise called Class2Simi. Specifically, we transform the training examples with noisy class labels into pairs of examples with noisy similarity labels and propose a deep learning framework to learn robust classifiers directly with the noisy similarity labels. Note that a class label shows the class that an instance belongs to; while a similarity label indicates whether or not two instances belong to the same class. It is worthwhile to perform the transformation: We prove that the noise rate for the noisy similarity labels is lower than that of the noisy class labels, because similarity labels themselves are robust to noise. For example, given two instances, even if both of their class labels are incorrect, their similarity label could be correct. Due to the lower noise rate, Class2Simi achieves remarkably better classification accuracy than its baselines that directly deals with the noisy class labels.

A similarity label indicates whether two instances belong to the same class while a class label shows the class of the instance. Without class labels, a multi-class classifier could be learned from similarity-labeled pairwise data by meta classification learning. However, since the similarity label is less informative than the class label, it is more likely to be noisy. Deep neural networks can easily remember noisy data, leading to overfitting in classification. In this paper, we propose a method for learning from only noisy-similarity-labeled data. Specifically, to model the noise, we employ a noise transition matrix to bridge the class-posterior probability between clean and noisy data. We further estimate the transition matrix from only noisy data and build a novel learning system to learn a classifier which can assign noise-free class labels for instances. Moreover, we theoretically justify how our proposed method generalizes for learning classifiers. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art method on benchmark-simulated and real-world noisy-label datasets.

Multiple-Instance (MI) learning is an important supervised learning technique which deals with collections of instances called bags. While existing research in MI learning mainly focused on classification, in this paper we propose a new approach for MI retrieval to enable effective similarity retrieval of bags of instances, where training data is presented in the form of similar and dissimilar bag pairs. An embedded scheme is devised as encoding each bag into a single bag feature vector by exploiting a similarity-based transformation. In this way, the original MI problem is converted into a single-instance version. Furthermore, we develop a principled approach for optimizing bag features specific to similarity retrieval through leveraging pairwise label information at the bag level. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison with the alternatives for MI retrieval.