Multi-instance multi-label active learning

Abstract

Multi-instance multi-label learning(MIML) has been successfully applied into many real-world applications. Along with the enhancing of the expressive power, the cost of labelling a MIML example increases significantly. And thus it becomes an important task to train an effective MIML model with as few labelled examples as possible. Active learning, which actively selects the most valuable data to query their labels, is a main approach to reducing labeling cost. Existing active methods achieved great success in traditional learning tasks, but cannot be directly applied to MIML problems. In this paper, we propose a MIML active learning algorithm, which exploits diversity and uncertainty in both the input and output space to query the most valuable information. This algorithm designs a novel query strategy for MIML objects specifically and acquires more precise information from the oracle without addition cost. Based on the queried information, the MIML model is then effectively trained by simultaneously optimizing the relative rank among instances and labels.