Dynamic Evidence Decoupling for Trusted Multi-view Learning

Ying Liu, Lihong Liu, Cai Xu, Xiangyu Song, Ziyu Guan, Wei Zhao

Abstract: Multi-view learning methods often focus on improving decision accuracy, while neglecting the decision uncertainty, limiting their suitability for safety-critical applications. To mitigate this, researchers propose trusted multi-view learning methods that estimate classification probabilities and uncertainty by learning the class distributions for each instance. However, these methods assume that the data from each view can effectively differentiate all categories, ignoring the semantic vagueness phenomenon in real-world multi-view data. Our findings demonstrate that this phenomenon significantly suppresses the learning of view-specific evidence in existing methods. We propose a Consistent and Complementary-aware trusted Multi-view Learning (CCML) method to solve this problem. We first construct view-opinions using evidential deep neural networks, which consist of belief mass vectors and uncertainty estimates. Next, we dynamically decouple the consistent and complementary evidence. The consistent evidence is derived from the shared portions across all views, while the complementary evidence is obtained by averaging the differing portions across all views. We ensure that the opinion constructed from the consistent evidence strictly aligns with the ground-truth category. For the opinion constructed from the complementary evidence, we only require it to reflect the probability of the true category, allowing for potential vagueness in the evidence. We compare CCML with state-of-the-art baselines on one synthetic and six real-world datasets. The results validate the effectiveness of the dynamic evidence decoupling strategy and show that CCML significant outperforms baselines on accuracy and reliability. We promise to release the code and all datasets on GitHub and show the link here.

Relevance To Conference: This paper proposes a new trusted multi-modal decision fusion method. This method could be applied in multiple multi-media applications.

Primary Subject Area: [Content] Multimodal Fusion

Secondary Subject Area: [Experience] Multimedia Applications

Submission Number: 3785