Navigating Conflicting Views: Harnessing Trust for Learning

Jueqing Lu, Lan Du, Wray L. Buntine, Myong Chol Jung, Joanna Dipnall, Belinda Gabbe

Abstract: Resolving conflicts is critical for improving the reliability of multi-view classification. While prior work focuses on learning consistent and informative representations across views, it often assumes perfect alignment and equal importance of all views, an assumption rarely met in real-world scenarios, as some views may express distinct information. To address this, we develop a computational trust-based discounting method that enhances the Evidential Multi-view framework by accounting for the instance-wise reliability of each view through a probability-sensitive trust mechanism. We evaluate our method on six real-world datasets using Top-1 Accuracy, Fleiss' Kappa, and a new metric, Multi-View Agreement with Ground Truth, to assess prediction reliability. We also assess the effectiveness of uncertainty in indicating prediction correctness via AUROC.Additionally, we test the scalability of our method through end-to-end training on a large-scale dataset. The experimental results show that computational trust can effectively resolve conflicts, paving the way for more reliable multi-view classification models in real-world applications.