Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) Main Conference Track
Jianxin Zhang, Yutong Wang, Clay Scott
Learning from label proportions (LLP) is a weakly supervised classification problem where data points are grouped into bags, and the label proportions within each bag are observed instead of the instance-level labels. The task is to learn a classifier to predict the labels of future individual instances. Prior work on LLP for multi-class data has yet to develop a theoretically grounded algorithm. In this work, we propose an approach to LLP based on a reduction to learning with label noise, using the forward correction (FC) loss of \textcite{Patrini2017MakingDN}. We establish an excess risk bound and generalization error analysis for our approach, while also extending the theory of the FC loss which may be of independent interest. Our approach demonstrates improved empirical performance in deep learning scenarios across multiple datasets and architectures, compared to the leading methods.