# Advocacy Learning: Learning through Competition and Class-Conditional Representations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.02723 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02723/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Learning Causal Mechanisms through Orthogonal Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03938/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce advocacy learning, a novel supervised training scheme for attention-based classification problems. Advocacy learning relies on a framework consisting of two connected networks: 1) N Advocates (one for each class), each of which outputs an argument in the form of an attention map over the input, and 2) a Judge, which predicts the class label based on these arguments. Each Advocate produces a class-conditional representation with the goal of convincing the Judge that the input example belongs to their class, even when the input belongs to a different class. Applied to several different classification tasks, we show that advocacy learning can lead to small improvements in classification accuracy over an identical supervised baseline. Though a series of follow-up experiments, we analyze when and how such class-conditional representations improve discriminative performance. Though somewhat counter-intuitive, a framework in which subnetworks are trained to competitively provide evidence in support of their class shows promise, in many cases performing on par with standard learning approaches. This provides a foundation for further exploration into competition and class-conditional representations in supervised learning.