Weakly supervised learning based on hypergraph manifold ranking

Significant challenges still remain despite the impressive recent advances in machine learning techniques, particularly in multimedia data understanding. One of the main challenges in real-world scenarios is the nature and relation between training and test datasets. Very often, only small sets of coarse-grained labeled data are available to train models, which are expected to be applied on large datasets and fine-grained tasks. Weakly supervised learning approaches handle such constraints by maximizing useful training information in labeled and unlabeled data. In this research direction, we propose a weakly supervised approach that analyzes the dataset manifold to expand the available labeled set. A hypergraph manifold ranking algorithm is exploited to represent the contextual similarity information encoded in the unlabeled data and identify strong similarity relations, which are taken as a path to label expansion. The expanded labeled set is subsequently exploited for a more comprehensive and accurate training process. The proposed model was evaluated jointly with supervised and semi-supervised classifiers, including Graph Convolutional Networks. The experimental results on image and video datasets demonstrate significant gains and accurate results for different classifiers in diverse scenarios. •This work proposes a label expansion approach through a hypergraph manifold ranking algorithm.•The label expansion process is entirely unsupervised.•A wide experimental evaluation on weakly supervised scenarios achieved significant gains.•Different classifiers were evaluated, including recent Graph Convolutional Networks.•The method is efficient in terms of runtime and space complexity.