Two-stage Training for Learning from Label Proportions

Learning from label proportions (LLP) aims at learning an instance-level classifier with label proportions in grouped training data. Existing deep learning based LLP methods utilize end-to-end pipelines to obtain the proportional loss with Kullback-Leibler divergence between the bag-level prior and posterior class distributions. However, the unconstrained optimization on this objective can hardly reach a solution in accordance with the given proportions. Besides, concerning the probabilistic classifier, this strategy unavoidably results in high-entropy conditional class distributions at the instance level. These issues further degrade the performance of the instance-level classification. In this paper, we regard these problems as noisy pseudo labeling, and instead impose the strict proportion consistency on the classifier with a constrained optimization as a continuous training stage for existing LLP classifiers. In addition, we introduce the mixup strategy and symmetric cross-entropy to further reduce the label noise. Our framework is model-agnostic, and demonstrates compelling performance improvement in extensive experiments, when incorporated into other deep LLP models as a post-hoc phase.

A Fast Algorithm for Multi-Class Learning from Label Proportions

Learning from label proportions (LLP) is a new kind of learning problem which has attracted wide interest in machine learning. Different from the well-known supervised learning, the training data of LLP is in the form of bags and only the proportion of each class in each bag is available. Actually, many modern applications can be successfully abstracted to this problem such as modeling voting behaviors and spam filtering. However, time-consuming training is still a challenge for LLP, which becomes a bottleneck especially when addressing large bags and bag sizes. In this paper, we propose a fast algorithm called multi-class learning from label proportions by extreme learning machine (LLP-ELM), which takes advantage of an extreme learning machine with fast learning speed to solve multi-class learning from label proportions. Firstly, we reshape the hidden layer output matrix and the training data target matrix of an extreme learning machine to adapt to the proportion information instead of the real labels. Secondly, a robust loss function with a regularization term is formulated and two efficient solutions are provided to different cases. Finally, various experiments demonstrate the significant speed-up of the proposed model with better accuracies on different datasets compared with several state-of-the-art methods.