Explicit Metric-Based Multiconcept Multi-Instance Learning With Triplet and Superbag

Multi-instance learning (MIL) has garnered considerable attention in recent years due to its favorable performance in various scenarios. Nonetheless, most previous studies have implicitly expressed the correlation between instances and bags. Moreover, the importance of negative instances has been largely overlooked. Hence, we seek to present an explicit and intuitively understandable method that can compensate for these deficiencies. In this article, we creatively introduce a metric-based multiconcept MIL approach based on two aspects. First, the triplet-based bag embedding method identifies instance categories and builds attention weights for every instance explicitly. Accordingly, bag embedding is accomplished under the limitation of weak supervision. Second, the developed instance correlation metric approach in the superbag considers the multiconcept issue to boost the model generalization performance. We have designed a rich variety of experiments to demonstrate the performance of our algorithm. The artificial data experiment reveals the interpretability of the proposed network. The results of the comparison experiment confirm that our method shows favorable performance in multiple tasks. Finally, we illustrate the motivation of the presented method by the ablation experiments.