Deterministic Annealing for Multiple-Instance Learning

In this paper we demonstrate how deterministic annealing can be applied to different SVM formulations of the multiple-instance learning (MIL) problem. Our results show that we find better local minima compared to the heuristic methods those problems are usually solved with. However this does not always translate into a better test error suggesting an inadequacy of the objective function. Based on this finding we propose a new objective function which together with the deterministic annealing algorithm finds better local minima and achieves better performance on a set of benchmark datasets. Furthermore the results also show how the structure of MIL datasets influence the performance of MIL algorithms and we discuss how future benchmark datasets for the MIL problem should be designed.