# Mitigating Instance Entanglement in Instance-Dependent Partial Label Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04825 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04825/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09501/) (2018)
- [DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02711/) (2021)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Autoencoders: Toward a Meaningful and Decodable Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15640/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models already have a Semantic Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10960/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Self-Guidance for Controllable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00986/) (2023)
- [EDICT: Exact Diffusion Inversion via Coupled Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12446/) (2022)
- [An Edit Friendly DDPM Noise Space: Inversion and Manipulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06140/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Model-Based Image Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17525/) (2024)
- [EGSDE: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Energy-Guided Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06635/) (2022)
- [InstructDiffusion: A Generalist Modeling Interface for Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03895/) (2023)
- [StyleDiffusion: Controllable Disentangled Style Transfer via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07863/) (2023)
- [LEDITS++: Limitless Image Editing using Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16711/) (2023)
- [Localizing Object-level Shape Variations with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11306/) (2023)
- [Uncovering the Disentanglement Capability in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08698/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Partial label learning is a prominent weakly supervised classification task, where each training instance is ambiguously labeled with a set of candidate labels. In real-world scenarios, candidate labels are often influenced by instance features, leading to the emergence of instance-dependent PLL (ID-PLL), a setting that more accurately reflects this relationship. A significant challenge in ID-PLL is instance entanglement, where instances from similar classes share overlapping features and candidate labels, resulting in increased class confusion. To address this issue, we propose a novel Class-specific Augmentation based Disentanglement (CAD) framework, which tackles instance entanglement by both intra- and inter-class regulations. For intra-class regulation, CAD amplifies class-specific features to generate class-wise augmentations and aligns same-class augmentations across instances. For inter-class regulation, CAD introduces a weighted penalty loss function that applies stronger penalties to more ambiguous labels, encouraging larger inter-class distances. By jointly applying intra- and inter-class regulations, CAD improves the clarity of class boundaries and reduces class confusion caused by entanglement. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of CAD in mitigating the entanglement problem and enhancing ID-PLL performance. The code is available at https://github.com/RyanZhaoIc/CAD.git.
