Towards Learning Causal Representations from Multi-Instance Bags

Although humans can easily identify the object of interest from groups of examples using group-level labels, most of the existing machine learning algorithms can only learn from individually labeled examples. Multi-instance learning (MIL) is a type of weakly supervised learning that deals with objects represented as groups of instances, and is theoretically capable of predicting instance labels from group-level supervision. Unfortunately, most existing MIL algorithms focus on improving the performances of group label predictions and cannot be used to accurately predict instance labels. In this work, we propose the TargetedMIL algorithm, which learns semantically meaningful representations that can be interpreted as causal to the object of interest. Utilizing the inferred representations, TargetedMIL excels at instance label predictions from group-level labels. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of TargetedMIL.