Learning from Label Proportions via Proportional Value Classification

Tianhao Ma, Wei Wang, Ximing Li, Gang Niu, Masashi Sugiyama

Keywords: Learning from label proportions, weakly supervised learning.

Abstract: Learning from Label Proportions~(LLP) aims to use bags of instances associated with the proportions of each label within the bag to learn an instance-level classifier. Proportion matching is a widely used strategy that aligns the average model outputs of all instances in a bag with the label proportions in order to induce the classifier. However, simply fitting the label proportions does not encourage discriminative instance-level predictions and may cause over-smoothing problems, resulting in poor classification performance. In this paper, we propose a novel LLP approach that can mitigate the over-smoothing problems with theoretical guarantees. Rather than fitting the label proportions directly, we treat them as targets for an auxiliary proportional value classification task to induce the target classifier. Our approach only requires the incorporation of an aggregation function after the classification layer. We also introduce an efficient computational approach with a divide-and-conquer strategy. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets and under different bag-generation strategies demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art LLP methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/TianhaoMa5/ICLR2026_LLP-PVC.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 10749