Partial label learning efficiently extracts accurate labels from weak supervision, where each instance has multiple candidate labels but only one is correct. Existing partial label learning methods typically employ a two-stage process and fall into a suboptimal solution in high-dimensional settings, lacking an effective feedback mechanism between feature selection and label disambiguation. Nevertheless, existing methods suffer from at least one of two issues, i.e., redundant features and the uncertainty of label disambiguation. To address these problems, we propose a unified and deep partial label feature selection method with CLuster-guided disAmbiguation and Structured Sparsity (CLASS), which simultaneously preserve discriminative features and promotes candidate label disambiguation by bidirectional optimization. Specifically, we integrate nonlinear deep networks to capture high-order semantic relations and feature interactions, while employing a linear sparse gating mechanism to preserve the label-specific, discriminative and interpretable features. Moreover, a cluster-guided disambiguation module is designed to enforce inter-class global separation and intra-class local cohesion via distance constraint and confidence penalty and dynamically align predicted labels with the semantics of class prototypes. Extensive experimental results validate the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed CLASS over state-of-the-art methods.

Imbalance in multi-domain multi-modal settings remains a significant challenge in real-world applications, such as fake news detection. Although existing methods have enhanced semantic representations and employed complex architectures to improve recognition performance, most of them focus on domain heterogeneity and modality sensitivity. However, these methods neglect the class imbalance, which severely impacts model robustness and generalization in open-world scenarios. Learning for such imbalanced multi-domain multi-modal data is crucial but rarely studied, particularly when the domain and modal of samples are imbalanced. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Imbalanced multi-domain multi-modal learning method with Expert Collaboration and Dynamic Fusion, named IECDF. Specifically, to alleviate inter-domain imbalance, we design an expert collaboration module with a domain-shared specific embedding structure and an improved gating strategy to enhance the discriminative power of the cross-domain features. Besides, a dynamic fusion mechanism based on Mamba-Former is designed to learn adaptive weights for each modality. Moreover, to tackle the intra-class imbalance problem, we adopt asymmetric re-weighted loss—DLINEX—to increase the contributions of minority class samples and learn the unbiased decision boundary. Extensive experimental results on various datasets validate the superiority of our proposed IECDF compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Yuchen-zh/IECDF .

Online learning is a fundamental paradigm for learning from continuous data stream. Tradition online learning approaches usually assume that the feature space of data stream is fixed and the incoming instance can always get the true label after making its prediction. However, in many real-world applications, such as the personalized recommender systems, the feature space may keep expanding due to the accumulation of user behaviors. Besides, we may only get bandit feedback, i.e., we only know whether the prediction is correct or not. To solve this important but rarely studied problem, we propose a novel algorithm LIFBF, together with its two variants LIFBF-I and LIFBF-II, to learn from data stream with incremental feature space and bandit feedback. Specifically, when an instance arrives with augmented features, we first utilize the exploration-exploitation strategy to guess its best label, then, a new loss function considering both bandit feedback and guessed label is proposed. Finally, we design a highly dynamic multi-class classifier, which updates the shared and augmented features by adopting the passive-aggressive rule and structural risk minimization principle, respectively. We theoretically analyze the cumulative loss bound of LIFBF. Besides, empirical studies on various datasets further validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.

The scarcity of labels is common and great challenge in traditional supervised learning. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) leverages unlabeled samples to alleviate the absence of label information. Similar with annotation, label proportion is another type of prior information and plays a significant role in classification tasks. Compared with the acquisition of labels, label proportion can be obtained more easily. For example, only a small number of patients have been diagnosed with or not with cancers in hospital database, while the proportion with cancer can be generally estimated by historical records. How to incorporate such prior information of label proportion is crucial but rarely studied in literature. Traditional SSL methods often ignore this prior information and will lead to performance degradation inevitably. To solve this problem, we propose a novel SSL with Label Proportion (SSLLP). Our approach encourages to preserve label consistency and label proportion by imposing the cardinality bound constraints. Our formulated problem equals to a mixed-integer constrained submodular minimization and it is difficult to be solved directly. Therefore, we transformed the original problem into a convex one by Lov$\acute{\text{a}}$sz extension and designed an efficient solving algorithm. Extensive experimental results present the improved performance of our method over several state-of-the-art methods.

Partial multi-view clustering has attracted various attentions from diverse fields. Most existing methods adopt separate steps to obtain unified representations and extract clustering indicators. This separate manner prevents two learning processes to negotiate to achieve optimal performance. In this paper, we propose the Joint Representation Learning and Clustering (JRLC) framework to address this issue. The JRLC framework employs representation matrices to extract view-specific clustering information directly from the presence of partial similarity matrices, and rotates them to learn a common probability label matrix simultaneously, which connects representation learning and clustering seamlessly to achieve better clustering performance. Under the guidance of JRLC framework, several new incomplete multi-view clustering methods can be developed by extending existing single-view graph-based representation learning methods. For illustration, within the framework, we propose two specific methods, JRLC with spectral embedding (JRLC-SE) and JRLC via integrating nonnegative embedding and spectral embedding (JRLC-NS). Two iterative algorithms with guaranteed convergence are designed to solve the resultant optimization problems of JRLC-SE and JRLC-NS. Experimental results on various datasets and news topic clustering application demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Feature selection plays a significant role in dealing with high-dimensional data to avoid the curse of dimensionality. In many real applications, like video semantic recognition, handling few labeled and large unlabeled data samples from the same population is a recently addressed challenge in feature selection. To solve this problem, we propose a novel semi-supervised feature selection method via insensitive sparse regression (ISR). Specifically, we compute the soft label matrix by the special label propagation, which can predict the labels of the unlabeled data. To guarantee the robustness of ISR to the false labeled instances or outliers, we propose Insensitive Regression Model (IRM) by capped$l_2$-$l_p$-norm loss. The soft label is imposed as the weights of IRM to fully utilize the label information. Meanwhile, to perform feature selection, we incorporate$l_{2,q}$-norm regularizer with IRM as the structural sparsity constraint when$0 < q\leq 1$. Moreover, we put forward an effective approach for solving the formulated non-convex optimization problem. We analyze the performance of convergence rigorously and discuss the parameter determination problem. Extensive experimental results on several public data sets verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in comparison with the state-of-art feature selection methods. Finally, we apply our method to video semantic recognition successfully.

The genome-wide association study (GWAS) is a popular approach to identify disease-associated genetic factors for Alzhemer's Disease (AD). However, it remains challenging because of the small number of samples, very high feature dimensionality and complex structures. To accurately identify genetic risk factors for AD, we propose a novel method based on an in-depth exploration of the hierarchical structure among the features and the commonality across related tasks. Specifically, we first extract and encode the tree hierarchy among features; then, we integrate the tree structures with multi-task feature learning (MTFL) to learn the shared features-that are predictive of AD-among related tasks simultaneously. Thus, we can unify the strength of both the prior structure information and MTFL to boost the prediction performance. However, due to the highly complex regularizer that encodes the tree structure and the extremely high feature dimensionality, the learning process can be computationally prohibitive. To address this, we further develop a novel safe screening rule to quickly identify and remove the irrelevant features before training. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in detecting genetic risk factors of AD and the speedup gained by the proposed screening can be several orders of magnitude.

Functional annotation of human genes is fundamentally important for understanding the molecular basis of various genetic diseases. A major challenge in determining the functions of human genes lies in the functional diversity of proteins, that is, a gene can perform different functions as it may consist of multiple protein coding isoforms (PCIs). Therefore, differentiating functions of PCIs can significantly deepen our understanding of the functions of genes. However, due to the lack of isoform-level gold-standards (ground-truth annotation), many existing functional annotation approaches are developed at gene-level. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to differentiate the functions of PCIs by integrating sparse simplex projection---that is, a nonconvex sparsity-inducing regularizer---with the framework of multi-instance learning (MIL). Specifically, we label the genes that are annotated to the function under consideration as positive bags and the genes without the function as negative bags. Then, by sparse projections onto simplex, we learn a mapping that embeds the original bag space to a discriminative feature space. Our framework is flexible to incorporate various smooth and non-smooth loss functions such as logistic loss and hinge loss. To solve the resulting highly nontrivial non-convex and non-smooth optimization problem, we further develop an efficient block coordinate descent algorithm. Extensive experiments on human genome data demonstrate that the proposed approaches significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods in terms of functional annotation accuracy of human PCIs and efficiency.