Leveraging Multi-modal Prior Knowledge for Large-scale Concept Learning in Noisy Web Data

Learning video concept detectors automatically from the big but noisy web data with no additional manual annotations is a novel but challenging area in the multimedia and the machine learning community. A considerable amount of videos on the web is associated with rich but noisy contextual information, such as the title and other multi-modal information, which provides weak annotations or labels about the video content. To tackle the problem of large-scale noisy learning, We propose a novel method called Multi-modal WEbly-Labeled Learning (WELL-MM), which is established on the state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm inspired by the learning process of human. WELL-MM introduces a novel multi-modal approach to incorporate meaningful prior knowledge called curriculum from the noisy web videos. We empirically study the curriculum constructed from the multi-modal features of the Internet videos and images. The comprehensive experimental results on FCVID and YFCC100M demonstrate that WELL-MM outperforms state-of-the-art studies by a statically significant margin on learning concepts from noisy web video data. In addition, the results also verify that WELL-MM is robust to the level of noisiness in the video data. Notably, WELL-MM trained on sufficient noisy web labels is able to achieve a better accuracy to supervised learning methods trained on the clean manually labeled data.