We study an extreme scenario in multi-label learning where each training instance is endowed with a single one-bit label out of multiple labels. We formulate this problem as a non-trivial special case of one-bit rank-one matrix sensing and develop an efficient non-convex algorithm based on alternating power iteration. The proposed algorithm is able to recover the underlying low-rank matrix model with linear convergence. For a rank-$k$ model with $d_1$ features and $d_2$ classes, the proposed algorithm achieves $O(epsilon)$ recovery error after retrieving $O(k^{1.5}d_1 d_2/epsilon)$ one-bit labels within $O(kd)$ memory. Our bound is nearly optimal in the order of $O(1/epsilon)$. This significantly improves the state-of-the-art sampling complexity of one-bit multi-label learning. We perform experiments to verify our theory and evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Many Machine Learning algorithms, such as deep neural networks, have long been criticized for being black-boxes-a kind of models unable to provide how it arrive at a decision without further efforts to interpret. This problem has raised concerns on model applications trust, safety, nondiscrimination, and other ethical issues. In this paper, we discuss the machine learning interpretability of a real-world application, eXtreme Multi-label Learning (XML), which involves learning models from annotated data with many pre-defined labels. We propose a two-step XML approach that combines deep non-negative autoencoder with other multi-label classifiers to tackle different data applications with a large number of labels. Our experimental result shows that the proposed approach is able to cope with many-label problems as well as to provide interpretable label hierarchies and dependencies that helps us understand how the model recognizes the existences of objects in an image.
Multi-label text classification is a popular machine learning task where each document is assigned with multiple relevant labels. This task is challenging due to high dimensional features and correlated labels. Multi-label text classifiers need to be carefully regularized to prevent the severe over-fitting in the high dimensional space, and also need to take into account label dependencies in order to make accurate predictions under uncertainty. We demonstrate significant and practical improvement by carefully regularizing the model complexity during training phase, and also regularizing the label search space during prediction phase. Specifically, we regularize the classifier training using Elastic-net (L1+L2) penalty for reducing model complexity/size, and employ early stopping to prevent overfitting. At prediction time, we apply support inference to restrict the search space to label sets encountered in the training set, and F-optimizer GFM to make optimal predictions for the F1 metric. We show that although support inference only provides density estimations on existing label combinations, when combined with GFM predictor, the algorithm can output unseen label combinations. Taken collectively, our experiments show state of the art results on many benchmark datasets. Beyond performance and practical contributions, we make some interesting observations. Contrary to the prior belief, which deems support inference as purely an approximate inference procedure, we show that support inference acts as a strong regularizer on the label prediction structure. It allows the classifier to take into account label dependencies during prediction even if the classifiers had not modeled any label dependencies during training.
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has demonstrated promising performance in single-label image classification tasks. However, how CNN best copes with multi-label images still remains an open problem, mainly due to the complex underlying object layouts and insufficient multi-label training images. In this work, we propose a flexible deep CNN infrastructure, called Hypotheses-CNN-Pooling (HCP), where an arbitrary number of object segment hypotheses are taken as the inputs, then a shared CNN is connected with each hypothesis, and finally the CNN output results from different hypotheses are aggregated with max pooling to produce the ultimate multi-label predictions. Some unique characteristics of this flexible deep CNN infrastructure include: 1) no ground truth bounding box information is required for training; 2) the whole HCP infrastructure is robust to possibly noisy and/or redundant hypotheses; 3) no explicit hypothesis label is required; 4) the shared CNN may be well pre-trained with a large-scale single-label image dataset, e.g. ImageNet; and 5) it may naturally output multi-label prediction results. Experimental results on Pascal VOC2007 and VOC2012 multi-label image datasets well demonstrate the superiority of the proposed HCP infrastructure over other state-of-the-arts. In particular, the mAP reaches 84.2% by HCP only and 90.3% after the fusion with our complementary result in [47] based on hand-crafted features on the VOC2012 dataset, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts with a large margin of more than 7%.
Zero-shot learning transfers knowledge from seen classes to novel unseen classes to reduce human labor of labelling data for building new classifiers. Much effort on zero-shot learning however has focused on the standard multi-class setting, the more challenging multi-label zero-shot problem has received limited attention. In this paper we propose a transfer-aware embedding projection approach to tackle multi-label zero-shot learning. The approach projects the label embedding vectors into a low-dimensional space to induce better inter-label relationships and explicitly facilitate information transfer from seen labels to unseen labels, while simultaneously learning a max-margin multi-label classifier with the projected label embeddings. Auxiliary information can be conveniently incorporated to guide the label embedding projection to further improve label relation structures for zero-shot knowledge transfer. We conduct experiments for zero-shot multi-label image classification. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.
We introduce a novel method to combat label noise when training deep neural networks for classification. We propose a loss function that permits abstention during training thereby allowing the DNN to abstain on confusing samples while continuing to learn and improve classification performance on the non-abstained samples. We show how such a deep abstaining classifier (DAC) can be used for robust learning in the presence of different types of label noise. In the case of structured or systematic label noise -- where noisy training labels or confusing examples are correlated with underlying features of the data-- training with abstention enables representation learning for features that are associated with unreliable labels. In the case of unstructured (arbitrary) label noise, abstention during training enables the DAC to be used as an effective data cleaner by identifying samples that are likely to have label noise. We provide analytical results on the loss function behavior that enable dynamic adaption of abstention rates based on learning progress during training. We demonstrate the utility of the deep abstaining classifier for various image classification tasks under different types of label noise; in the case of arbitrary label noise, we show significant improvements over previously published results on multiple image benchmarks. Source code is available at https://github.com/thulas/dac-label-noise