Abstract In partial label learning, each training example is associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only one is valid. An intuitive strategy to learn from partial label examples is to treat all candidate labels equally and make prediction by averaging their modeling outputs. Nonetheless, this strategy may suffer from the problem that the modeling output from the valid label is overwhelmed by those from the false positive labels. In this paper, an instance-based approach named I PAL is proposed by directly disambiguating the candidate label set. Briefly, I PAL tries to identify the valid labe of each partial label example via an iterative label propagation procedure, and then classifies the unseen instance based on minimum error reconstruction from its nearest neighbors. Extensive experiments show that I PAL compares favorably against the existing instance-based as well as other stateof-the-art partial label learning approaches.