Dual Perspective of Label-Specific Feature Learning for Multi-Label Classification

Label-specific features serve as an effective strategy to facilitate multi-label classification, which account for the distinct discriminative properties of each class label via tailoring its own features. Existing approaches implement this strategy in a quite straightforward way, i.e. finding the most pertinent and discriminative features for each class label and directly inducing classifiers on constructed label-specific features. In this paper, we propose a dual perspective for label-specific feature learning, where label-specific discriminative properties are considered by identifying each label’s own non-informative features and making the discrimination process immutable to variations of these features. To instantiate it, we present a perturbation-based approach DELA to provide classifiers with label-specific immutability on simultaneously identified non-informative features, which is optimized towards a probabilistically-relaxed expected risk minimization problem. Comprehensive experiments on 10 benchmark data sets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts.