Bringing Clustering to MLL: Weakly-Supervised Clustering for Partial Multi-Label Learning

arXiv:2604.09359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Label noise in multi-label learning (MLL) poses significant challenges for model training, particularly in partial multi-label learning (PML) where candidate labels contain both relevant and irrelevant labels. While clustering offers a natural approach to exploit data structure for noise identification, traditional clustering methods cannot be directly applied to multi-label scenarios due to a fundamental incompatibility: clustering produces membership values that sum to one per instance, whereas multi-label assignments require binary values that can sum to any number. We propose a novel weakly-supervised clustering approach for PML (WSC-PML) that bridges clustering and multi-label learning through membership matrix decomposition. Our key innovation decomposes the clustering membership matrix mathbf{A} into two components: mathbf{A} = mathbf{Pi} odot mathbf{F}, where mathbf{Pi} maintains clustering constraints while mathbf{F} preserves multi-label characteristics. This decomposition enables seamless integration of unsupervised clustering with multi-label supervision for effective label noise handling. WSC-PML employs a three-stage process: initial prototype learning from noisy labels, adaptive confidence-based weak supervision construction, and joint optimization via iterative clustering refinement. Extensive experiments on 24 datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms six state-of-the-art methods across all evaluation metrics.

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Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-04-13