Active learning (AL), which iteratively queries the most informative examples from a large pool of unlabeled candidates for model training, faces significant challenges in the presence of open-set classes. Existing methods either prioritize query examples likely to belong to known classes, indicating low epistemic uncertainty (EU), or focus on querying those with highly uncertain predictions, reflecting high aleatoric uncertainty (AU). However, they both yield suboptimal performance, as low EU corresponds to limited useful information, and closed-set AU metrics for unknown class examples are less meaningful. In this paper, we propose an Energy-Based Active Open-Set Annotation (EAOA) framework, which effectively integrates EU and AU to achieve superior performance. EAOA features a (C + 1)-class detector and a target classifier, incorporating an energy-based EU measure and a margin-based energy loss designed for the detector, alongside an energy-based AU measure for the target classifier. Another crucial component is the target-driven adaptive sampling strategy. It first forms a smaller candidate set with low EU scores to ensure closed-set properties, making AU metrics meaningful. Subsequently, examples with high AU scores are queried to form the final query set, with the candidate set size adjusted adaptively. Extensive experiments show that EAOA achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high query precision and low training overhead. The code is available at this link.

Partial label learning is a prevalent weakly supervised learning paradigm. Despite the impressive performance achieved by existing methods (e.g., those based on self-training or semi-supervised learning (SSL)), they often suffer from error accumulation or inefficient data utilization. To address these, we aim to actively avoid errors at each training stage and fully leverage information from all available data, encompassing candidate and non-candidate labels. C-FreeMix consists of two stages and performs SSL from a conflict-free perspective. In the warm-up stage, we propose conflict-free negative learning to ensure nontoxic supervision signals along with rapid convergence capability. In the SSL stage, we define a Margin metric to select examples with less ambiguity as labeled ones precisely. Then, MixMatch is adopted with two improvements: label refinement and partial mixup, to utilize all available information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that C-FreeMix outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods.

Federated learning (FL) enables distributed collaborative learning across local clients while preserving data privacy. However, its practical application in weakly supervised learning (WSL), where only a small subset of data is labeled, remains underexplored. Active learning (AL) is a promising solution for label-limited scenarios, but its adaptation to federated settings presents unique challenges, such as data heterogeneity and noise. In this paper, we propose Inconsistency-based Federated Active Learning (IFAL), a novel approach to address these challenges. First, we introduce a data-driven probability formulation that aligns the biases between local and global models in heterogeneous FL settings. Next, to mitigate noise, we propose an inter-model inconsistency criterion that filters out noisy examples and focuses on those with beneficial prediction discrepancies. Additionally, we introduce an intra-model inconsistency criterion to query examples that help refine the model’s decision boundaries. By combining these strategies with clustering, IFAL effectively selects a diverse and informative query set. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that IFAL outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Traditional knowledge distillation focuses on aligning the student's predicted probabilities with both ground-truth labels and the teacher's predicted probabilities. However, the transition to predicted probabilities from logits would obscure certain indispensable information. To address this issue, it is intuitive to additionally introduce a logit-level loss function as a supplement to the widely used probability-level loss function, for exploiting the latent information of logits. Unfortunately, we empirically find that the amalgamation of the newly introduced logit-level loss and the previous probability-level loss will lead to performance degeneration, even trailing behind the performance of employing either loss in isolation. We attribute this phenomenon to the collapse of the classification head, which is verified by our theoretical analysis based on the neural collapse theory. Specifically, the gradients of the two loss functions exhibit contradictions in the linear classifier yet display no such conflict within the backbone. Drawing from the theoretical analysis, we propose a novel method called dual-head knowledge distillation, which partitions the linear classifier into two classification heads responsible for different losses, thereby preserving the beneficial effects of both losses on the backbone while eliminating adverse influences on the classification head. Extensive experiments validate that our method can effectively exploit the information inside the logits and achieve superior performance against state-of-the-art counterparts

Noisy label learning (NLL) in open-world scenarios poses a novel challenge due to the presence of noisy data from both known and unknown classes. Most existing methods operate under the closed-set assumption, rendering them vulnerable to open-set noise, which significantly degrades their performance. While some approaches attempt to mitigate the impact of open-set examples, they struggle to learn effective discriminative representations for them, leading to unsatisfactory recognition performance. To address these issues, we propose a unified Open Adapter (OpenAda) that identifies open-set noise from both data-centric and learning-based perspectives, and can be easily integrated into mainstream NLL methods to improve their performance and robustness. Specifically, the data-centric part leverages label clusterability to sequentially identify basic clean and basic open-set examples both with high neighbor agreement. The learning-based part integrates one-vs-all classifiers with a progressive open disambiguation strategy to learn a reliable “inlier vs. outlier” boundary for each class. This enables the model to detect challenging open-set examples that partially overlap in the representation space with closed-set ones. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the superiority of our approach. Notably, with minor modifications, DivideMix with OpenAda achieves performance improvements of 9.31% and 18.26% on the open-world CIFAR-80 dataset under 80% symmetric noise and 40% asymmetric noise. The code is available athttps://github.com/chenchenzong/OpenAda.

Learning with noisy labels can significantly hinder the generalization performance of deep neural networks (DNNs). Existing approaches address this issue through loss correction or example selection methods. However, these methods often rely on the model's predictions obtained from the softmax function, which can be over-confident and unreliable. In this study, we identify the translation invariance of the softmax function as the underlying cause of this problem and propose the \textit{Dirichlet-based Prediction Calibration} (DPC) method as a solution. Our method introduces a calibrated softmax function that breaks the translation invariance by incorporating a suitable constant in the exponent term, enabling more reliable model predictions. To ensure stable model training, we leverage a Dirichlet distribution to assign probabilities to predicted labels and introduce a novel evidence deep learning (EDL) loss. The proposed loss function encourages positive and sufficiently large logits for the given label, while penalizing negative and small logits for other labels, leading to more distinct logits and facilitating better example selection based on a large-margin criterion. Through extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that DPC achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/chenchenzong/DPC.

Active learning (AL) has achieved great success by selecting the most valuable examples from unlabeled data. However, they usually deteriorate in real scenarios where open-set noise gets involved, which is studied as open-set annotation (OSA). In this paper, we owe the deterioration to the unreliable predictions arising from softmax-based translation invariance and propose a Dirichlet-based Coarse-to-Fine Example Selection (DCFS) strategy accordingly. Our method introduces simplex-based evidential deep learning (EDL) to break translation invariance and distinguish known and unknown classes by considering evidence-based data and distribution uncertainty simultaneously. Furthermore, hard known-class examples are identified by model discrepancy generated from two classifier heads, where we amplify and alleviate the model discrepancy respectively for unknown and known classes. Finally, we combine the discrepancy with uncertainties to form a two-stage strategy, selecting the most informative examples from known classes. Extensive experiments on various openness ratio datasets demonstrate that DCFS achieves state-of-art performance.

The goal of semi-supervised multi-label learning (SSMLL) is to improve model performance by leveraging the information of unlabeled data. Recent studies usually adopt the pseudo-labeling strategy to tackle unlabeled data based on the assumption that labeled and unlabeled data share the same distribution. However, in realistic scenarios, unlabeled examples are often collected through cost-effective methods, inevitably introducing out-of-distribution (OOD) data, leading to a significant decline in model performance. In this paper, we propose a safe semi-supervised multi-label learning framework based on the theory of evidential deep learning (EDL), with the goal of achieving robust and effective unlabeled data exploitation. On one hand, we propose the asymmetric beta loss to not only compensate for the lack of robustness in common MLL losses, but also to solve the inherent positive-negative imbalance problem faced by the EDL losses in MLL. On the other hand, to construct a robust SSMLL framework, we adopt a dual-head structure to generate class probabilities and instance uncertainties. The former are used to generate pseudo-labels, while the latter are utilized to filter OOD examples. To avoid the need for threshold estimation, we develop a dual-measurement weighted loss function to safely perform unlabeled training. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in both OOD detection and SSMLL tasks.

Existing knowledge distillation methods typically work by imparting the knowledge of output logits or intermediate feature maps from the teacher network to the student network, which is very successful in multi-class single-label learning. However, these methods can hardly be extended to the multi-label learning scenario, where each instance is associated with multiple semantic labels, because the prediction probabilities do not sum to one and feature maps of the whole example may ignore minor classes in such a scenario. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-label knowledge distillation method. On one hand, it exploits the informative semantic knowledge from the logits by dividing the multi-label learning problem into a set of binary classification problems; on the other hand, it enhances the distinctiveness of the learned feature representations by leveraging the structural information of label-wise embeddings. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets validate that the proposed method can avoid knowledge counteraction among labels, thus achieving superior performance against diverse comparing methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/penghui-yang/L2D.

Active learning tries to learn an effective model with lowest labeling cost. Most existing active learning methods work in a synchronous way, which implies that the label querying can be performed only after the model updating in each iteration. While training models is usually time-consuming, it may lead to serious latency between two queries, especially in the crowdsourcing environments where there are many online annotators working simultaneously. This will significantly decrease the labeling efficiency and strongly limit the application of active learning in real tasks. To overcome this challenge, we propose a multi-server multi-worker framework for asynchronous active learning in the distributed environment. By maintaining two shared pools of candidate queries and labeled data respectively, the servers, the workers and the annotators efficiently corporate with each other without synchronization. Moreover, diverse sampling strategies from distributed workers are incorporated to select the most useful instances for model improving. Both theoretical analysis and experimental study validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.