Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Title

Proceedings of Machine Learning Research

Abstract

In conventional supervised classification, true labels are required for individual instances. However, it could be prohibitive to collect the true labels for individual instances, due to privacy concerns or unaffordable annotation costs. This motivates the study on classification from aggregate observations (CFAO), where the supervision is provided to groups of instances, instead of individual instances. CFAO is a generalized learning framework that contains various learning problems, such as multiple-instance learning and learning from label proportions. The goal of this paper is to present a novel universal method of CFAO, which holds an unbiased estimator of the classification risk for arbitrary losses-previous research failed to achieve this goal. Practically, our method works by weighing the importance of each label for each instance in the group, which provides purified supervision for the classifier to learn. Theoretically, our proposed method not only guarantees the risk consistency due to the unbiased risk estimator but also can be compatible with arbitrary losses. Extensive experiments on various problems of CFAO demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.

First Page

36804

Last Page

36820

Publication Date

7-2023

Keywords

Generalized learning, Learn+, Learning frameworks, Learning problem, Multiple-instance learning, Privacy concerns, Supervised classification, Unbiased estimator, Unbiased risk estimator, Universal method

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Open Access version from PMLR

Uploaded on June 21, 2024

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