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1. Learning from Label Proportions by Learning with Label Noise

   Zhang, Jianxin ; Wang, Yutong ; Scott, Clayton ( January 2022 , 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022))

   Learning from label proportions (LLP) is a weakly supervised classification problem where data points are grouped into bags, and the label proportions within each bag are observed instead of the instance-level labels. The task is to learn a classifier to predict the labels of future individual instances. Prior work on LLP for multi-class data has yet to develop a theoretically grounded algorithm. In this work, we propose an approach to LLP based on a reduction to learning with label noise, using the forward correction (FC) loss of Patrini et al. [30]. We establish an excess risk bound and generalization error analysis for our approach, while also extending the theory of the FC loss which may be of independent interest. Our approach demonstrates improved empirical performance in deep learning scenarios across multiple datasets and architectures, compared to the leading methods. 

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2. Learning from Label Proportions:A Mutual Contamination Framework

   Scott, Clayton ; Zhang, Jianxin ( January 2020 , Advances in neural information processing systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Learning from label proportions (LLP) is a weakly supervised setting for classification in whichunlabeled training instances are grouped into bags, and each bag is annotated with the proportion ofeach class occurring in that bag. Prior work on LLP has yet to establish a consistent learning procedure,nor does there exist a theoretically justified, general purpose training criterion. In this work we addressthese two issues by posing LLP in terms of mutual contamination models (MCMs), which have recentlybeen applied successfully to study various other weak supervision settings. In the process, we establishseveral novel technical results for MCMs, including unbiased losses and generalization error bounds undernon-iid sampling plans. We also point out the limitations ofa common experimental setting for LLP,and propose a new one based on our MCM framework. 

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3. Learning from Label Proportions: A Mutual Contamination Framework

   Scott, Clayton ; Zhang, Jianxin ( January 2020 , 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020))

   null (Ed.)

   Learning from label proportions (LLP) is a weakly supervised setting for classification in which unlabeled training instances are grouped into bags, and each bag is annotated with the proportion of each class occurring in that bag. Prior work on LLP has yet to establish a consistent learning procedure, nor does there exist a theoretically justified, general purpose training criterion. In this work we address these two issues by posing LLP in terms of mutual contamination models (MCMs), which have recently been applied successfully to study various other weak supervision settings. In the process, we establish several novel technical results for MCMs, including unbiased losses and generalization error bounds under non-iid sampling plans. We also point out the limitations of a common experimental setting for LLP, and propose a new one based on our MCM framework. 

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4. A Second-Order Approach to Learning with Instance-Dependent Label Noise

   Zhu, Zhaowei ; Liu, Tongliang ; Liu, Yang ( January 2021 , Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition)

   null (Ed.)

   The presence of label noise often misleads the training of deep neural networks. Departing from the recent literature which largely assumes the label noise rate is only determined by the true label class, the errors in human-annotated labels are more likely to be dependent on the difficulty levels of tasks, resulting in settings with instance-dependent label noise. We first provide evidences that the heterogeneous instance-dependent label noise is effectively down-weighting the examples with higher noise rates in a non-uniform way and thus causes imbalances, rendering the strategy of directly applying methods for class-dependent label noise questionable. Built on a recent work peer loss [24], we then propose and study the potentials of a second-order approach that leverages the estimation of several covariance terms defined between the instance-dependent noise rates and the Bayes optimal label. We show that this set of second-order statistics successfully captures the induced imbalances. We further proceed to show that with the help of the estimated second-order statistics, we identify a new loss function whose expected risk of a classifier under instance-dependent label noise is equivalent to a new problem with only class-dependent label noise. This fact allows us to apply existing solutions to handle this better-studied setting. We provide an efficient procedure to estimate these second-order statistics without accessing either ground truth labels or prior knowledge of the noise rates. Experiments on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 with synthetic instance-dependent label noise and Clothing1M with real-world human label noise verify our approach. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/UCSC-REAL/CAL. 

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5. RL-LABEL: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach Intended for AR Label Placement in Dynamic Scenarios

   Chen, Z. ; Chiappalupi, D. ; Lin, T. ; Beyer, J. ; Yang, Y. ; Pfister, H. ( January 2023 , IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics)

   Labels are widely used in augmented reality (AR) to display digital information. Ensuring the readability of AR labels requires placing them occlusion-free while keeping visual linkings legible, especially when multiple labels exist in the scene. Although existing optimization-based methods, such as force-based methods, are effective in managing AR labels in static scenarios, they often struggle in dynamic scenarios with constantly moving objects. This is due to their focus on generating layouts optimal for the current moment, neglecting future moments and leading to sub-optimal or unstable layouts over time. In this work, we present RL-LABEL, a deep reinforcement learning-based method for managing the placement of AR labels in scenarios involving moving objects. RL-LABEL considers the current and predicted future states of objects and labels, such as positions and velocities, as well as the user’s viewpoint, to make informed decisions about label placement. It balances the trade-offs between immediate and long-term objectives. Our experiments on two real-world datasets show that RL-LABEL effectively learns the decision-making process for long-term optimization, outperforming two baselines (i.e., no view management and a force-based method) by minimizing label occlusions, line intersections, and label movement distance. Additionally, a user study involving 18 participants indicates that RL-LABEL excels over the baselines in aiding users to identify, compare, and summarize data on AR labels within dynamic scenes. 

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