Boosting Single Positive Multi-label Classification with Generalized Robust Loss

Boosting Single Positive Multi-label Classification with Generalized Robust Loss

Yanxi Chen, Chunxiao Li, Xinyang Dai, Jinhuan Li, Weiyu Sun, Yiming Wang, Renyuan Zhang, Tinghe Zhang, Bo Wang

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3825-3833. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/423

Multi-label learning (MLL) requires comprehensive multi-semantic annotations that is hard to fully obtain, thus often resulting in missing labels scenarios. In this paper, we investigate Single Positive Multi-label Learning (SPML), where each image is associated with merely one positive label. Existing SPML methods only focus on designing losses using mechanisms such as hard pseudo-labeling and robust losses, mostly leading to unacceptable false negatives. To address this issue, we first propose a generalized loss framework based on expected risk minimization to provide soft pseudo labels, and point out that the former losses can be seamlessly converted into our framework. In particular, we design a novel robust loss based on our framework, which enjoys flexible coordination between false positives and false negatives, and can additionally deal with the imbalance between positive and negative samples. Extensive experiments show that our approach can significantly improve SPML performance and outperform the vast majority of state-of-the-art methods on all the four benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/yan4xi1/GRLoss.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Multi-label learning
Machine Learning: ML: Classification
Machine Learning: ML: Weakly supervised learning