LLP-AAE: Learning from label proportions with adversarial autoencoder.

This paper presents an effective weakly supervised learning algorithm LLP-AAE to leverage the adversarial autoencoder (AAE) for learning from label proportions (LLP), in which only the bag-level proportional information is available. Our LLP-AAE utilizes an autoencoder backbone and performs adversarial training in latent space to match the aggregated posterior distribution of hidden coding with the prior distributions. In this way, apart from the reconstruction task, the encoder is also dedicated to producing fake samples, in order to deceive discriminators as far as possible. Ultimately, the encoder is employed as a competent label predictor for unseen data. In addition to the LLP classifier, our model can also achieve controllable samples generation by feeding the decoder with gradually changing latent code, which is proven to be useful for a better LLP performance. We also provide a panoramic explanation for LLP-AAE by regarding the LLP problem as an alternative learning procedure between proportion-based pseudo label generation and discriminative reconstruction. Experiments on six benchmark image datasets demonstrate the advantage of our method both in style manipulation with the latent feature representation and comparable multi-class LLP performance with the state-of-the-art models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]