Adaptive Graph Guided Disambiguation for Partial Label Learning

Partial label learning aims to induce a multi-class classifier from training examples where each of them is associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only one is the ground-truth label. The common strategy to train predictive model is disambiguation, i.e. differentiating the modeling outputs of individual candidate labels so as to recover ground-truth labeling information. Recently, feature-aware disambiguation was proposed to generate different labeling confidences over candidate label set by utilizing the graph structure of feature space. However, the existence of noise and outliers in training data makes the similarity derived from original features less reliable. To this end, we proposed a novel approach for partial label learning based on adaptive graph guided disambiguation (PL-AGGD). Compared with fixed graph, adaptive graph could be more robust and accurate to reveal the intrinsic manifold structure within the data. Moreover, instead of the two-stage strategy in previous algorithms, our approach performs label disambiguation and predictive model training simultaneously. Specifically, we present a unified framework which jointly optimizes the ground-truth labeling confidences, similarity graph and model parameters to achieve strong generalization performance. Extensive experiments show that PL-AGGD performs favorably against state-of-the-art partial label learning approaches.