Multi-instance multi-label (MIML) learning has many interesting applications in computer visions, including multi-object recognition and automatic image tagging. In these applications, additional information such as bounding-boxes, image captions and descriptions is often available during training phrase, which is referred as privileged information (PI). However, as existing works on learning using PI only consider instance-level PI (privileged instances), they fail to make use of bag-level PI (privileged bags) available in MIML learning. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a two-stream fully convolutional network, named MIML-FCN+, unified by a novel PI loss to solve the problem of MIML learning with privileged bags. Compared to the previous works on PI, the proposed MIML-FCN+ utilizes the readily available privileged bags, instead of hard-to-obtain privileged instances, making the system more general and practical in real world applications. As the proposed PI loss is convex and SGD compatible and the framework itself is a fully convolutional network, MIML-FCN+ can be easily integrated with state of-the-art deep learning networks. Moreover, the flexibility of convolutional layers allows us to exploit structured correlations among instances to facilitate more effective training and testing. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MIML-FCN+, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in the application of multi-object recognition.
In this paper, we formalize multi-instance multi-label learning, where each training example is associated with not only multiple instances but also multiple class labels. Such a problem can occur in many real-world tasks, e.g. an image usually contains multiple patches each of which can be described by a feature vector, and the image can belong to multiple categories since its semantics can be recognized in different ways. We analyze the relationship between multi-instance multi-label learning and the learning frameworks of traditional supervised learning, multi-instance learning and multi-label learning. Then, we propose the MIMLBOOST and MIMLSVM algorithms which achieve good performance in an application to scene classification.  Multi-instance multi-label learning (MIML) is a framework for supervised classification where the objects to be classified are bags of instances associated with multiple labels. For example, an image can be represented as a bag of segments and associated with a list of objects it contains. Prior work on MIML has focused on predicting label sets for previously unseen bags. We instead consider the problem of predicting instance labels while learning from data labeled only at the bag level. We propose Rank-Loss Support Instance Machines, which optimize a regularized rank-loss objective and can be instantiated with different aggregation models connecting instance-level predictions with bag-level predictions. The aggregation models that we consider are equivalent to defining a "support instance" for each bag, which allows efficient optimization of the rank-loss objective using primal sub-gradient descent. Experiments on artificial and real-world datasets show that the proposed methods achieve higher accuracy than other loss functions used in prior work, e.g., Hamming loss, and recent work in ambiguous label classification. This paper studies the problem of image annotation in a multi-modal setting where both visual and textual information are available. We propose Multimodal Multi-instance Multi-label Latent Dirichlet Allocation (M3LDA), where the model consists of a visual-label part, a textual-label part and a label-topic part. The basic idea is that the topic decided by the visual information and the topic decided by the textual information should be consistent, leading to the correct label assignment. Particularly, M3LDA is able to annotate image regions, thus provides a promising way to understand the relation between input patterns and output semantics. Experiments on Corel5K and ImageCLEF validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We propose Dirichlet-Bernoulli Alignment (DBA), a generative model for corpora in which each pattern (e.g., a document) contains a set of instances (e.g., paragraphs in the document) and belongs to multiple classes. By casting predefined classes as latent Dirichlet variables (i.e., instance level labels), and modeling the multi-label of each pattern as Bernoulli variables conditioned on the weighted empirical average of topic assignments, DBA automatically aligns the latent topics discovered from data to human-defined classes. DBA is useful for both pattern classification and instance disambiguation, which are tested on text classification and named entity disambiguation in web search queries respectively. In many real world applications we do not have access to fully-labeled training data, but only to a list of possible labels. This is the case, e.g., when learning visual classifiers from images downloaded from the web, using just their text captions or tags as learning oracles. In general, these problems can be very difficult. However most of the time there exist different implicit sources of information, coming from the relations between instances and labels, which are usually dismissed. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised framework to model this kind of problems. Each training sample is a bag containing multi-instances, associated with a set of candidate labeling vectors. Each labeling vector encodes the possible labels for the instances in the bag, with only one being fully correct. The use of the labeling vectors provides a principled way not to exclude any information. We propose a large margin discriminative formulation, and an efficient algorithm to solve it. Experiments conducted on artificial datasets and a real-world images and captions dataset show that our approach achieves performance comparable to an SVM trained with the ground-truth labels, and outperforms other baselines. In this paper, we address the problem of multi-instance multi-label learning (MIML) where each example is associated with not only multiple instances but also multiple class labels. In our novel approach, given an MIML example, each instance in the example is only associated with a single label and the label set of the example is the aggregation of all instance labels. Many real-world tasks such as scene classification, text categorization and gene sequence encoding can be properly formalized under our proposed approach. We formulate our MIML problem as a combination of two optimizations: (1) a quadratic programming (QP) that minimizes the empirical risk with L2-norm regularization, and (2) an integer programing (IP) assigning each instance to a single label. We also present an efficient method combining the stochastic gradient decent and alternating optimization approaches to solve our QP and IP optimizations. In our experiments with both an artificially generated data set and real-world applications, i.e. scene classification and text categorization, our proposed method achieves superior performance over existing state-of-the-art MIML methods such as MIMLBOOST, MIMLSVM, M @math MIML and MIMLRBF.