Partial Label Learning via Label Enhancement

Partial label learning aims to learn from training examples each associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only one label is valid for the training example. The common strategy to induce predictive model is trying to disambiguate the candidate label set, such as disambiguation by identifying the ground-truth label iteratively or disambiguation by treating each candidate label equally. Nonetheless, these strategies ignore considering the generalized label distribution corresponding to each instance since the generalized label distribution is not explicitly available in the training set. In this paper, a new partial label learning strategy named PL-LE is proposed to learn from partial label examples via label enhancement. Specifically, the generalized label distributions are recovered by leveraging the topological information of the feature space. After that, a multi-class predictive model is learned by fitting a regularized multi-output regressor with the generalized label distributions. Extensive experiments show that PL-LE performs favorably against state-of-the-art partial label learning approaches.