Abstract. In order to train learning models for multi-label classification (MLC),
it is typically desirable to have a large amount of fully annotated multi-label
data. Since such annotation process is in general costly, we focus on the learning
task of weakly-supervised multi-label classification (WS-MLC). In this paper, we
tackle WS-MLC by learning deep generative models for describing the collected
data. In particular, we introduce a sequential network architecture for constructing
our generative model with the ability to approximate observed data posterior
distributions. We show that how information of training data with missing labels
or unlabeled ones can be exploited, which allows us to learn multi-label classifiers
via scalable variational inferences. Empirical studies on various scales of datasets
demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, which performs favorably
against state-of-the-art MLC algorithms