Multi-label active learning for image classification has been a popular research topic. It faces several challenges, even though related work has made great progress. Existing studies on multi-label active learning do not pay attention to the cleanness of sample data. In reality, data are easily polluted by external influences that are likely to disturb the exploration of data space and have a negative effect on model training. Previous methods of label correlation mining, which are purely based on observed label distribution, are defective. Apart from neglecting noise influence, they also cannot acquire sufficient relevant information. In fact, they neglect inner relation mapping from example space to label space, which is an implicit way of modeling label relationships. To solve these issues, we develop a novel multi-label active learning with low-rank application (ENMAL) algorithm in this paper. A low-rank model is constructed to quantize noise level, and the example-label pairs that contain less noise are emphasized when sampling. A low-rank mapping matrix is learned to signify the mapping relation of a multi-label domain to capture a more comprehensive and reasonable label correlation. Integrating label correlation with uncertainty and considering sample noise, an efficient sampling strategy is developed. We extend ENMAL with automatic labeling (denoted as AL-ENMAL) to further reduce the annotation workload of active learning. Empirical research demonstrates the efficacy of our approaches.

In multi-label image classification, each image is always associated with multiple labels and labels are usually correlated with each other. The intrinsic relation among labels can definitely contribute to classifier training. However, most previous studies on active learning for multi-label image classification purely mine label correlation based on observed label distribution. They ignore the mapping relation between examples and their labels. This mapping relation also implicates label relationship. Ignoring the mapping relation leads to an uncomprehensive label correlation estimation and results in a bad performance for classification. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-label active learning with low-rank mapping for image classification, called LMMAL, to solve this issue. More precisely, we train a low-rank mapping matrix to signify the mapping relation between the feature space and the label space of a certain multi-label dataset. Using this low-rank mapping relation, we exploit a full label correlation. Subsequently, an effective sampling strategy is designed by integrating this potential information with uncertainty to select the most informative example-label pairs. In addition, we extend LMMAL with automatic labeling (denoted as AL-LMMAL) to further reduce the annotation workload of active learning. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches.

Multi-label active learning for image classification has attracted great attention over recent years and a lot of relevant works are published continuously. However, there still remain some problems that need to be solved, such as existing multi-label active learning algorithms do not reflect on the cleanness of sample data and their ways on label correlation mining are defective. For one thing, sample data is usually contaminated in reality, which disturbs the estimation of data distribution and further hinders the model training. For another, previous approaches for label relationship exploration are purely based on the observed label distribution of an incomplete training set, which cannot provide sufficiently efficient information. To address these issues, we propose a novel adaptive low-rank multi-label active learning algorithm, called LRMAL. Specifically, we first use low-rank matrix recovery to learn an effective low-rank feature representation from the noisy data. In a subsequent sampling phase, we make use of its superiorities to evaluate the general informativeness of each unlabeled example-label pair. Based on an intrinsic mapping relation between the example space and the label space of a certain multi-label dataset, we recover the incomplete labels of a training set for a more comprehensive label correlation mining. Furthermore, to reduce the redundancy among the selected example-label pairs, we use a diversity measurement to diversify the sampled data. Finally, an effective sampling strategy is developed by integrating these two aspects of potential information with uncertainty based on an adaptive integration scheme. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.