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Embracing Biased Transition Matrices for Complementary-Label Learning with Many Classes

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Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2605.15586 (cs)
[Submitted on 15 May 2026]

Title:Embracing Biased Transition Matrices for Complementary-Label Learning with Many Classes

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Abstract:Complementary-label learning (CLL) is a weakly supervised paradigm where instances are labeled with classes they do not belong to. Despite a decade of research, CLL methods remain competitive mainly on 10-class classification, with scaling to large label spaces continuing to be an enduring bottleneck. This limitation stems from the common assumption of uniform label generation in traditional methods, which fatally dilutes the learning signal in many-class settings. In this paper, we demonstrate that this long-standing barrier can be overcome by deliberately designing a biased (non-uniform) generation process that restricts complementary labels to a subset of classes. This finding motivates us to propose Bias-Induced Constrained Labeling (BICL), a principled framework spanning data collection to training that leverages this bias. BICL enables effective learning on CIFAR-100 and TinyImageNet-200, achieving more than sevenfold accuracy improvements over traditional methods. Our findings establish a new trajectory for making CLL feasible for many classes in real-world applications.
Comments: 33 pages, 16 figures, 18 tables
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.15586 [cs.LG]
  (or arXiv:2605.15586v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.15586
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Ha Mai Tan [view email]
[v1] Fri, 15 May 2026 03:49:04 UTC (1,482 KB)
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