English

Least-Ambiguous Multi-Label Classifier

Machine Learning 2025-09-16 v1

Abstract

Multi-label learning often requires identifying all relevant labels for training instances, but collecting full label annotations is costly and labor-intensive. In many datasets, only a single positive label is annotated per training instance, despite the presence of multiple relevant labels. This setting, known as single-positive multi-label learning (SPMLL), presents a significant challenge due to its extreme form of partial supervision. We propose a model-agnostic approach to SPMLL that draws on conformal prediction to produce calibrated set-valued outputs, enabling reliable multi-label predictions at test time. Our method bridges the supervision gap between single-label training and multi-label evaluation without relying on label distribution assumptions. We evaluate our approach on 12 benchmark datasets, demonstrating consistent improvements over existing baselines and practical applicability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.10689,
  title  = {Least-Ambiguous Multi-Label Classifier},
  author = {Misgina Tsighe Hagos and Claes Lundström},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.10689},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted at the 37th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, ICTAI 2025

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:34:21.620Z