Exploiting Global Information for Partial Multi-Label Learning

doi:10.1109/TKDE.2026.3677879

Exploiting Global Information for Partial Multi-Label Learning

2026-03-26

0

PRE

AI

DOI：10.1109/TKDE.2026.3677879

Original

Original request for help

Save

Abstract

En 中文

Partial Multi-Label Learning (PML) is an emerging weakly supervised learning framework, where each instance contains a candidate label set with only some labels being ground-truth labels. Many existing PML methods recover the information of the ground-truth label set through k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) disambiguation. However, this popular strategy might be suboptimal, as it makes disambiguation for a given instance based solely on its neighbors’ features and class labels, i.e., the local structural information in the feature space, thereby missing the opportunity to explicitly and sufficiently leverage the global structural information in the feature space to facilitate disambiguation. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm called PRAG, i.e., PaRtiAl multi-label learning by exploiting Global information, which incorporates the global factor obtained from the features of all the training instances into the kNN disambiguation process. Specifically, we learn for each instance a global factor vector, which captures the global affinity between an instance and each label across the feature space. This global factor vector is continuously updated through iterative propagation, with each iteration computing the global factor vector based on the similarity between the instance’s features and a dynamically constructed label prototype for each label. The label prototype is formed by aggregating the features of all training instances weighted by their current estimated confidence for that label. Crucially, the global factor vector serves as a weighting mechanism during aggregation of the neighbor labels in the kNN disambiguation step. It effectively injects global structural information into the local disambiguation process, providing a more robust estimation of label confidence by mitigating the limitations of relying solely on potentially noisy local neighbors. Based on the estimated label confidence, PRAG then exploits label correlations to classify instances. We conducted extensive experiments on various real and synthetic datasets, and the results show the superiority of PRAG compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Keywords:

Partial multi-label learning

label prototype

global factor

Exploiting Global Information for Partial Multi-Label Learning

Abstract

Journal

Organization