Learning from True-False Labels via Multi-modal Prompt Retrieving

Weakly supervised learning has recently achieved considerable success in reducing annotation costs and label noise. Unfortunately, existing weakly supervised learning methods are short of ability in generating reliable labels via pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs). In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised labeling setting, namely True-False Labels (TFLs) which can achieve high accuracy when generated by VLMs. The TFL indicates whether an instance belongs to the label, which is randomly and uniformly sampled from the candidate label set. Specifically, we theoretically derive a risk-consistent estimator to explore and utilize the conditional probability distribution information of TFLs. Besides, we propose a convolutional-based Multi-modal Prompt Retrieving (MRP) method to bridge the gap between the knowledge of VLMs and target learning tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TFL setting and MRP learning method. The code to reproduce the experiments is at https://github.com/Tranquilxu/TMP.

Determined Multi-Label Learning via Similarity-Based Prompt

In multi-label classification, each training instance is associated with multiple class labels simultaneously. Unfortunately, collecting the fully precise class labels for each training instance is time- and labor-consuming for real-world applications. To alleviate this problem, a novel labeling setting termed \textit{Determined Multi-Label Learning} (DMLL) is proposed, aiming to effectively alleviate the labeling cost inherent in multi-label tasks. In this novel labeling setting, each training instance is associated with a \textit{determined label} (either "Yes" or "No"), which indicates whether the training instance contains the provided class label. The provided class label is randomly and uniformly selected from the whole candidate labels set. Besides, each training instance only need to be determined once, which significantly reduce the annotation cost of the labeling task for multi-label datasets. In this paper, we theoretically derive an risk-consistent estimator to learn a multi-label classifier from these determined-labeled training data. Additionally, we introduce a similarity-based prompt learning method for the first time, which minimizes the risk-consistent loss of large-scale pre-trained models to learn a supplemental prompt with richer semantic information. Extensive experimental validation underscores the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Learning from Reduced Labels for Long-Tailed Data

Long-tailed data is prevalent in real-world classification tasks and heavily relies on supervised information, which makes the annotation process exceptionally labor-intensive and time-consuming. Unfortunately, despite being a common approach to mitigate labeling costs, existing weakly supervised learning methods struggle to adequately preserve supervised information for tail samples, resulting in a decline in accuracy for the tail classes. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a novel weakly supervised labeling setting called Reduced Label. The proposed labeling setting not only avoids the decline of supervised information for the tail samples, but also decreases the labeling costs associated with long-tailed data. Additionally, we propose an straightforward and highly efficient unbiased framework with strong theoretical guarantees to learn from these Reduced Labels. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets including ImageNet validate the effectiveness of our approach, surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods.

Multi-label Learning from Privacy-Label

Multi-abel Learning (MLL) often involves the assignment of multiple relevant labels to each instance, which can lead to the leakage of sensitive information (such as smoking, diseases, etc.) about the instances. However, existing MLL suffer from failures in protection for sensitive information. In this paper, we propose a novel setting named Multi-Label Learning from Privacy-Label (MLLPL), which Concealing Labels via Privacy-Label Unit (CLPLU). Specifically, during the labeling phase, each privacy-label is randomly combined with a non-privacy label to form a Privacy-Label Unit (PLU). If any label within a PLU is positive, the unit is labeled as positive; otherwise, it is labeled negative, as shown in Figure 1. PLU ensures that only non-privacy labels are appear in the label set, while the privacy-labels remain concealed. Moreover, we further propose a Privacy-Label Unit Loss (PLUL) to learn the optimal classifier by minimizing the empirical risk of PLU. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.

Learning from Stochastic Labels

Annotating multi-class instances is a crucial task in the field of machine learning. Unfortunately, identifying the correct class label from a long sequence of candidate labels is time-consuming and laborious. To alleviate this problem, we design a novel labeling mechanism called stochastic label. In this setting, stochastic label includes two cases: 1) identify a correct class label from a small number of randomly given labels; 2) annotate the instance with None label when given labels do not contain correct class label. In this paper, we propose a novel suitable approach to learn from these stochastic labels. We obtain an unbiased estimator that utilizes less supervised information in stochastic labels to train a multi-class classifier. Additionally, it is theoretically justifiable by deriving the estimation error bound of the proposed method. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on widely-used benchmark datasets to validate the superiority of our method by comparing it with existing state-of-the-art methods.

Complementary Labels Learning with Augmented Classes

Complementary Labels Learning (CLL) arises in many real-world tasks such as private questions classification and online learning, which aims to alleviate the annotation cost compared with standard supervised learning. Unfortunately, most previous CLL algorithms were in a stable environment rather than an open and dynamic scenarios, where data collected from unseen augmented classes in the training process might emerge in the testing phase. In this paper, we propose a novel problem setting called Complementary Labels Learning with Augmented Classes (CLLAC), which brings the challenge that classifiers trained by complementary labels should not only be able to classify the instances from observed classes accurately, but also recognize the instance from the Augmented Classes in the testing phase. Specifically, by using unlabeled data, we propose an unbiased estimator of classification risk for CLLAC, which is guaranteed to be provably consistent. Moreover, we provide generalization error bound for proposed method which shows that the optimal parametric convergence rate is achieved for estimation error. Finally, the experimental results on several benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Class-Imbalanced Complementary-Label Learning via Weighted Loss

Complementary-label learning (CLL) is a common application in the scenario of weak supervision. However, in real-world datasets, CLL encounters class-imbalanced training samples, where the quantity of samples of one class is significantly lower than those of other classes. Unfortunately, existing CLL approaches have yet to explore the problem of class-imbalanced samples, which reduces the prediction accuracy, especially in imbalanced classes. In this paper, we propose a novel problem setting to allow learning from class-imbalanced complementarily labeled samples for multi-class classification. Accordingly, to deal with this novel problem, we propose a new CLL approach, called Weighted Complementary-Label Learning (WCLL). The proposed method models a weighted empirical risk minimization loss by utilizing the class-imbalanced complementarily labeled information, which is also applicable to multi-class imbalanced training samples. Furthermore, the estimation error bound of the proposed method was derived to provide a theoretical guarantee. Finally, we do extensive experiments on widely-used benchmark datasets to validate the superiority of our method by comparing it with existing state-of-the-art methods.

Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data with Augmented Classes

Positive Unlabeled (PU) learning aims to learn a binary classifier from only positive and unlabeled data, which is utilized in many real-world scenarios. However, existing PU learning algorithms cannot deal with the real-world challenge in an open and changing scenario, where examples from unobserved augmented classes may emerge in the testing phase. In this paper, we propose an unbiased risk estimator for PU learning with Augmented Classes (PUAC) by utilizing unlabeled data from the augmented classes distribution, which can be easily collected in many real-world scenarios. Besides, we derive the estimation error bound for the proposed estimator, which provides a theoretical guarantee for its convergence to the optimal solution. Experiments on multiple realistic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approach.

InfoAT: Improving Adversarial Training Using the Information Bottleneck Principle

Adversarial training (AT) has shown excellent high performance in defending against adversarial examples. Recent studies demonstrate that examples are not equally important to the final robustness of models during AT, that is, the so-called hard examples that can be attacked easily exhibit more influence than robust examples on the final robustness. Therefore, guaranteeing the robustness of hard examples is crucial for improving the final robustness of the model. However, defining effective heuristics to search for hard examples is still difficult. In this article, inspired by the information bottleneck (IB) principle, we uncover that an example with high mutual information of the input and its associated latent representation is more likely to be attacked. Based on this observation, we propose a novel and effective adversarial training method (InfoAT). InfoAT is encouraged to find examples with high mutual information and exploit them efficiently to improve the final robustness of models. Experimental results show that InfoAT achieves the best robustness among different datasets and models in comparison with several state-of-the-art methods.

Low-Dose CT Denoising via Sinogram Inner-Structure Transformer

Low-Dose Computed Tomography (LDCT) technique, which reduces the radiation harm to human bodies, is now attracting increasing interest in the medical imaging field. As the image quality is degraded by low dose radiation, LDCT exams require specialized reconstruction methods or denoising algorithms. However, most of the recent effective methods overlook the inner-structure of the original projection data (sinogram) which limits their denoising ability. The inner-structure of the sinogram represents special characteristics of the data in the sinogram domain. By maintaining this structure while denoising, the noise can be obviously restrained. Therefore, we propose an LDCT denoising network namely Sinogram Inner-Structure Transformer (SIST) to reduce the noise by utilizing the inner-structure in the sinogram domain. Specifically, we study the CT imaging mechanism and statistical characteristics of sinogram to design the sinogram inner-structure loss including the global and local inner-structure for restoring high-quality CT images. Besides, we propose a sinogram transformer module to better extract sinogram features. The transformer architecture using a self-attention mechanism can exploit interrelations between projections of different view angles, which achieves an outstanding performance in sinogram denoising. Furthermore, in order to improve the performance in the image domain, we propose the image reconstruction module to complementarily denoise both in the sinogram and image domain.