Navigating Real-World Partial Label Learning: Unveiling Fine-Grained Images with Attributes

Partial label learning (PLL), a significant research area, addresses the challenge of annotating each sample with a candidate label set containing the true label when obtaining accurate labels is infeasible. However, existing PLL methods often rely on generic datasets like CIFAR, where annotators can readily differentiate candidate labels and are unlikely to confuse, making it less realistic for real-world partial label applications. In response, our research focuses on a rarely studied problem, PLL on fine-grained images with attributes. And we propose a novel framework called Shared to Learn, Distinct to Disambiguate (SoDisam). Within the candidate label set, the categories may exhibit numerous shared attribute features, posing a challenge in accurately distinguishing them. Rather than perceiving it as an impediment, we capitalize on these shared attributes as definitive sources of supervision. This insight guides us to learn attribute space visual representation to focus on the information from these shared attributes. Moreover, we introduce an attribute attention mechanism tailored to harness the remaining distinct attributes. This mechanism directs the originally holistic feature towards specific regions, capturing corresponding discriminative features. In addition, a dynamic disambiguation module is introduced, continuously adjusting the two aforementioned mechanisms and achieve the final disambiguation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on fine-grained partial label datasets. The proposed SoDisam framework not only addresses the challenges associated with fine-grained partial label learning but also provides a more realistic representation of real-world partial label scenarios.