Batch Selection for Multi-Label Classification Guided by Uncertainty and Dynamic Label Correlations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel batch selection method for multi-label classification that uses dynamic uncertainty and label correlations to improve training efficiency and model performance.

Contribution

It proposes an uncertainty-based batch selection algorithm that considers label prediction fluctuations and evolving label correlations during training.

Findings

Improves multi-label model accuracy.

Speeds up convergence of training.

Effective across various deep learning models.

Abstract

The accuracy of deep neural networks is significantly influenced by the effectiveness of mini-batch construction during training. In single-label scenarios, such as binary and multi-class classification tasks, it has been demonstrated that batch selection algorithms preferring samples with higher uncertainty achieve better performance than difficulty-based methods. Although there are two batch selection methods tailored for multi-label data, none of them leverage important uncertainty information. Adapting the concept of uncertainty to multi-label data is not a trivial task, since there are two issues that should be tackled. First, traditional variance or entropy-based uncertainty measures ignore fluctuations of predictions within sliding windows and the importance of the current model state. Second, existing multi-label methods do not explicitly exploit the label correlations, particularly the uncertainty-based label correlations that evolve during the training process. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-based multi-label batch selection algorithm. It assesses uncertainty for each label by considering differences between successive predictions and the confidence of current outputs, and further leverages dynamic uncertainty-based label correlations to emphasize instances whose uncertainty is synergistically expressed across multiple labels. Empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in improving the performance and accelerating the convergence of various multi-label deep learning models.