Discriminative and consistent similarities in instance-level Multiple Instance Learning

In this paper we present a bottom-up method to instance-level Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) that learns to discover positive instances with globally constrained reasoning about local pairwise similarities. We discover positive instances by optimizing for a ranking such that positive (top rank) instances are highly and consistently similar to each other and dissimilar to negative instances. Our approach takes advantage of a discriminative notion of pairwise similarity coupled with a structural cue in the form of a consistency metric that measures the quality of each similarity. We learn a similarity function for every pair of instances in positive bags by how similarly they differ from instances in negative bags, the only certain labels in MIL. Our experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MIL methods both at bag-level and instance-level predictions in standard benchmarks, image category recognition, and text categorization datasets.