Partial multi-label learning via label-specific feature corrections

Partial multi-label learning (PML) allows learning from rich-semantic objects with inaccurate annotations, where a set of candidate labels are assigned to each training example but only some of them are valid. Existing approaches rely on disambiguation to tackle the PML problem, which aims to correct noisy candidate labels by recovering the ground-truth labeling information ahead of prediction model induction. However, this dominant strategy might be suboptimal as it usually needs extra assumptions that cannot be fully satisfied in real-world scenarios. Instead of label correction, we investigate another strategy to tackle the PML problem, where the potential ambiguity in PML data is eliminated by correcting instance features in a label-specific manner. Accordingly, a simple yet effective approach named Pase, i.e., partial multi-label learning via label-specific feature corrections, is proposed. Under a meta-learning framework, Pase learns to exert label-specific feature corrections so that potential ambiguity specific to each class label can be eliminated and the desired prediction model can be induced on these corrected instance features with the provided candidate labels. Comprehensive experiments on a wide range of synthetic and real-world data sets validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.