Multi-instance learning (MIL) deals with tasks where data consist of set of bags and each bag is represented by a set of instances. Only the bag labels are observed but the label for each instance is not available. Previous MIL studies typically assume that the training and test samples follow the same distribution, which is often violated in real-world applications. Existing methods address distribution changes by re-weighting the training data with the density ratio between the training and test samples. However, models are often trained without prior knowledge of the test distribution which renders existing methods inapplicable. Inspired by a connection between MIL and causal inference, we propose a novel framework for addressing distribution change in MIL without relying on the test distribution. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach.
Several MIL algorithms have been proposed to address distribution change by utilizing the test distribution to calculate importance weight. MICS @cite_11 solves the problem by modeling the bag-level and instance-level distribution changes together. MIKI @cite_2 proposes that the distributions of positive instances should be modeled explicitly to address shifts of the positive concepts.
@cite_2 @cite_11
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The goal of traditional multi-instance learning (MIL) is to predict the labels of the bags, whereas in many real applications, it is desirable to get the instance labels, especially the labels of key instances that trigger the bag labels, in addition to getting bag labels. Such a problem has been largely unexplored before. In this paper, we formulate the Key Instance Detection (KID) problem, and propose a voting framework (VF) solution to KID. The key of VF is to exploit the relationship among instances, represented by a citer kNN graph. This graph is dierent from commonly used nearest neighbor graphs, but is suitable for KID. Experiments validate the eectiveness of VF for KID. Additionally, VF also outperforms state-of-the-art MIL approaches on the performance of bag label prediction. Multi-instance learning deals with tasks where each example is a bag of instances, and the bag labels of training data are known whereas instance labels are unknown. Most previous studies on multi-instance learning assumed that the training and testing data are from the same distribution; however, this assumption is often violated in real tasks. In this paper, we present possibly the first study on multi-instance learning with distribution change. We propose the MICS approach by considering both bag-level and instance-level distribution change. Experiments show that MICS is almost always significantly better than many state-of-theart multi-instance learning algorithms when distribution change occurs; and even when there is no distribution change, their performances are still comparable