Extracting Privileged Information for Enhancing Classifier Learning

Yazhou Yao, Fumin Shen, Jian Zhang, Li Liu, Zhenmin Tang, Ling Shao

Abstract: The accuracy of data-driven learning approaches is often unsatisfactory when the training data is inadequate either in quantity or quality. Manually labeled privileged information (PI), e.g., attributes, tags or properties, is usually incorporated to improve classifier learning. However, the process of manually labeling is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, due to the limitations of personal knowledge, manually labeled PI may not be rich enough. To address these issues, we propose to enhance classifier learning by exploring PI from untagged corpora, which can effectively eliminate the dependency on manually labeled data and obtain much richer PI. In detail, we treat each selected PI as a subcategory and learn one classifier for each subcategory independently. The classifiers for all subcategories are integrated together to form a more powerful category classifier. Particularly, we propose a novel instance-level multi-instance learning model to simultaneously select a subset of training images from each subcategory and learn the optimal SVM classifiers based on the selected images. Extensive experiments on four benchmark data sets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach.