Teaching-to-Learn and Learning-to-Teach for Multi-label Propagation

Multi-label propagation aims to transmit the multi-label information from labeled examples to unlabeled examples based on a weighted graph. Existing methods ignore the specific propagation difficulty of different unlabeled examples and conduct the propagation in an imperfect sequence, leading to the error-prone classification of some difficult examples with uncertain labels. To address this problem, this paper associates each possible label with a “teacher”, and proposes a “Multi-Label Teaching-to-Learn and Learning-toTeach” (ML-TLLT) algorithm, so that the entire propagation process is guided by the teachers and manipulated from simple examples to more difficult ones. In the teaching-to-learn step, the teachers select the simplest examples for the current propagation by investigating both the definitiveness of each possible label of the unlabeled examples, and the dependencies between labels revealed by the labeled examples. In the learning-to-teach step, the teachers reversely learn from the learner’s feedback to properly select the simplest examples for the next propagation. Thorough empirical studies show that due to the optimized propagation sequence designed by the teachers, ML-TLLT yields generally better performance than seven state-of-the-art methods on the typical multi-label benchmark datasets.