In many real-world tasks, the concerned objects can be represented as a
multi-instance bag associated with a candidate label set, which consists of one
ground-truth label and several false positive labels. Multi-instance
partial-label learning (MIPL) is a learning paradigm to deal with such tasks
and has achieved favorable performances. Existing MIPL approach follows the
instance-space paradigm by assigning augmented candidate label sets of bags to
each instance and aggregating bag-level labels from instance-level labels.
However, this scheme may be suboptimal as global bag-level information is
ignored and the predicted labels of bags are sensitive to predictions of
negative instances. In this paper, we study an alternative scheme where a
multi-instance bag is embedded into a single vector representation.
Accordingly, an intuitive algorithm named DEMIPL, i.e., Disambiguated attention
Embedding for Multi-Instance Partial-Label learning, is proposed. DEMIPL
employs a disambiguation attention mechanism to aggregate a multi-instance bag
into a single vector representation, followed by a momentum-based
disambiguation strategy to identify the ground-truth label from the candidate
label set. Furthermore, we introduce a real-world MIPL dataset for colorectal
cancer classification. Experimental results on benchmark and real-world
datasets validate the superiority of DEMIPL against the compared MIPL and
partial-label learning approaches.Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 202