Uncertainty-Aware Partial-Label Learning

In real-world applications, one often encounters ambiguously labeled data, where different annotators assign conflicting class labels. Partial-label learning allows training classifiers in this weakly supervised setting. While state-of-the-art methods already feature good predictive performance, they often suffer from miscalibrated uncertainty estimates. However, having well-calibrated uncertainty estimates is important, especially in safety-critical domains like medicine and autonomous driving. In this article, we propose a novel nearest-neighbor-based partial-label-learning algorithm that leverages Dempster-Shafer theory. Extensive experiments on artificial and real-world datasets show that the proposed method provides a well-calibrated uncertainty estimate and achieves competitive prediction performance. Additionally, we prove that our algorithm is risk-consistent.