Label enhancement for label distribution learning via prior knowledge

Abstract

Label distribution learning (LDL) is a novel machine learning paradigm that gives a description degree of each label to an instance. However, most of training datasets only contain simple logical labels rather than label distributions due to the difficulty of obtaining the label distributions directly. We propose to use the prior knowledge to recover the label distributions. The process of recovering the label distributions from the logical labels is called label enhancement. In this paper, we formulate the label enhancement as a dynamic decision process. Thus, the label distribution is adjusted by a series of actions conducted by a reinforcement learning agent according to sequential state representations. The target state is defined by the prior knowledge. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both age estimation and image emotion recognition.