Class Prior-Free Positive-Unlabeled Learning with Taylor Variational Loss for Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Imagery

Positive-unlabeled learning (PU learning) in hyperspectral remote sensing imagery (HSI) is aimed at learning a binary classifier from positive and unlabeled data, which has broad prospects in various earth vision applications. However, when PU learning meets limited labeled HSI, the unlabeled data may dominate the optimization process, which makes the neural networks overfit the unlabeled data. In this paper, a Taylor variational loss is proposed for HSI PU learning, which reduces the weight of the gradient of the unlabeled data by Taylor series expansion to enable the network to find a balance between overfitting and underfitting. In addition, the self-calibrated optimization strategy is designed to stabilize the training process. Experiments on 7 benchmark datasets (21 tasks in total) validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Code is at: https://github.com/Hengwei-Zhao96/T-HOneCls.

1. Introduction

Positive-unlabeled learning is aimed at learning a binary classifier from positive and unlabeled data [21], [17], [3]. Due to the lack of negative samples, PU learning is a challenging task, but play an important role in machine learning applications, including product recommendation [16], deceptive reviews detection [30], and medical diagnosis [39].