Exploring Commonality and Individuality for Multi-Modal Curriculum Learning

Abstract

Curriculum Learning (CL) mimics the cognitive process ofhumans and favors a learning algorithm to follow the logical learning sequence from simple examples to more difficult ones. Recent studies show that selecting the simplest curriculum examples from different modalities for graph-based label propagation can yield better performance than simply leveraging single modality. However, they forcibly requirethe curriculums generated by all modalities to be identical to a common curriculum, which discard the individuality ofevery modality and produce the inaccurate curriculum for the subsequent learning. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel multi-modal CL algorithm by comprehensively investigating both the individuality and commonality of different modalities. By considering the curriculums of multiple modalities altogether, their common preference on selecting the simplestexamples can be explored by a row-sparse matrix, and their distinct opinions are captured by a sparse noise matrix. As a consequence, a "soft" fusion of multiple curriculums from different modalities is achieved and the propagation quality can thus be improved. Comprehensive empirical studies reveal that our method can generate higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art multi-modal CL approach and label propagation algorithms on various image classification tasks.