Intra-Cluster Mixup: An Effective Data Augmentation Technique for Complementary-Label Learning

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Hauptverfasser: Mai, Tan-Ha, Lin, Hsuan-Tien
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Mai, Tan-Ha
Lin, Hsuan-Tien
author_facet Mai, Tan-Ha
Lin, Hsuan-Tien
contents In this paper, we investigate the challenges of complementary-label learning (CLL), a specialized form of weakly-supervised learning (WSL) where models are trained with labels indicating classes to which instances do not belong, rather than standard ordinary labels. This alternative supervision is appealing because collecting complementary labels is generally cheaper and less labor-intensive. Although most existing research in CLL emphasizes the development of novel loss functions, the potential of data augmentation in this domain remains largely underexplored. In this work, we uncover that the widely-used Mixup data augmentation technique is ineffective when directly applied to CLL. Through in-depth analysis, we identify that the complementary-label noise generated by Mixup negatively impacts the performance of CLL models. We then propose an improved technique called Intra-Cluster Mixup (ICM), which only synthesizes augmented data from nearby examples, to mitigate the noise effect. ICM carries the benefits of encouraging complementary label sharing of nearby examples, and leads to substantial performance improvements across synthetic and real-world labeled datasets. In particular, our wide spectrum of experimental results on both balanced and imbalanced CLL settings justifies the potential of ICM in allying with state-of-the-art CLL algorithms, achieving significant accuracy increases of 30% and 10% on MNIST and CIFAR datasets, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_17971
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Intra-Cluster Mixup: An Effective Data Augmentation Technique for Complementary-Label Learning
Mai, Tan-Ha
Lin, Hsuan-Tien
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
In this paper, we investigate the challenges of complementary-label learning (CLL), a specialized form of weakly-supervised learning (WSL) where models are trained with labels indicating classes to which instances do not belong, rather than standard ordinary labels. This alternative supervision is appealing because collecting complementary labels is generally cheaper and less labor-intensive. Although most existing research in CLL emphasizes the development of novel loss functions, the potential of data augmentation in this domain remains largely underexplored. In this work, we uncover that the widely-used Mixup data augmentation technique is ineffective when directly applied to CLL. Through in-depth analysis, we identify that the complementary-label noise generated by Mixup negatively impacts the performance of CLL models. We then propose an improved technique called Intra-Cluster Mixup (ICM), which only synthesizes augmented data from nearby examples, to mitigate the noise effect. ICM carries the benefits of encouraging complementary label sharing of nearby examples, and leads to substantial performance improvements across synthetic and real-world labeled datasets. In particular, our wide spectrum of experimental results on both balanced and imbalanced CLL settings justifies the potential of ICM in allying with state-of-the-art CLL algorithms, achieving significant accuracy increases of 30% and 10% on MNIST and CIFAR datasets, respectively.
title Intra-Cluster Mixup: An Effective Data Augmentation Technique for Complementary-Label Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17971