Trustworthy Partial Label Learning with Out-of-distribution Detection

Partial Label Learning (PLL) grapples with learning from ambiguously labelled data, and it has been successfully applied in fields such as image recognition. Nevertheless, traditional PLL methods rely on the closed-world assumption, which can be limiting in open-world scenarios and negatively impact model performance and generalization. To tackle these challenges, our study introduces a novel method called PLL-OOD, which is the first to incorporate Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection into the PLL framework. PLL-OOD significantly enhances model adaptability and accuracy by merging self-supervised learning with partial label loss and pioneering the Partial-Energy (PE) score for OOD detection. This approach improves data feature representation and effectively disambiguates candidate labels, using a dynamic label confidence matrix to refine predictions. The PE score, adjusted by label confidence, precisely identifies OOD instances, optimizing model training towards in-distribution data. This innovative method markedly boosts PLL model robustness and performance in open-world settings. To validate our approach, we conducted a comprehensive comparative experiment combining the existing state-of-the-art PLL model with multiple OOD scores on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets with various OOD datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed PLL-OOD framework is highly effective and effectiveness outperforms existing models, showcasing its superiority and effectiveness.