# Weakly Supervised Label Learning Flows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.09649 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09649/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [PartNet: A Large-scale Benchmark for Fine-grained and Hierarchical Part-level 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02713/) (2018)
- [PointFlow: 3D Point Cloud Generation with Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12320/) (2019)
- [Autoencoding beyond pixels using a learned similarity metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.09300/) (2015)
- [Snorkel: Rapid Training Data Creation with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10160/) (2017)
- [A note on the evaluation of generative models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.01844/) (2015)
- [Flow++: Improving Flow-Based Generative Models with Variational Dequantization and Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00275/) (2019)
- [Data Programming: Creating Large Training Sets, Quickly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07723/) (2016)
- [SRFlow: Learning the Super-Resolution Space with Normalizing Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14200/) (2020)
- [Training Complex Models with Multi-Task Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02840/) (2018)
- [Fast and Three-rious: Speeding Up Weak Supervision with Triplet Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11955/) (2020)
- [WRENCH: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11377/) (2021)
- [Discrete Point Flow Networks for Efficient Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10170/) (2020)
- [Fine-Tuning Pre-trained Language Model with Weak Supervision: A Contrastive-Regularized Self-Training Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07835/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13025/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised 3D Shape Completion through GAN Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13366/) (2021)
- [Discrete Flows: Invertible Generative Models of Discrete Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10347/) (2019)
- [Unpaired Point Cloud Completion on Real Scans using Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00069/) (2019)
- [Multimodal Shape Completion via Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07717/) (2020)
- [Conditional Density Estimation with Bayesian Normalising Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04908/) (2018)
- [Snorkel DryBell: A Case Study in Deploying Weak Supervision at Industrial Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00417/) (2018)
- [C-Flow: Conditional Generative Flow Models for Images and 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07009/) (2019)
- [Cycle4Completion: Unpaired Point Cloud Completion using Cycle Transformation with Missing Region Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07838/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Supervised learning usually requires a large amount of labelled data. However, attaining ground-truth labels is costly for many tasks. Alternatively, weakly supervised methods learn with cheap weak signals that only approximately label some data. Many existing weakly supervised learning methods learn a deterministic function that estimates labels given the input data and weak signals. In this paper, we develop label learning flows (LLF), a general framework for weakly supervised learning problems. Our method is a generative model based on normalizing flows. The main idea of LLF is to optimize the conditional likelihoods of all possible labelings of the data within a constrained space defined by weak signals. We develop a training method for LLF that trains the conditional flow inversely and avoids estimating the labels. Once a model is trained, we can make predictions with a sampling algorithm. We apply LLF to three weakly supervised learning problems. Experiment results show that our method outperforms many baselines we compare against.