Meta-Label-Corrected Knowledge Distillation for Partial Multi-Label Learning

Partial multi-label learning (PML) assigns each instance a candidate label set that contains all relevant labels but may also include irrelevant noisy ones, making reliable disambiguation essential. Although a small number of verified clean labels is often available in practice, existing PML methods rarely exploit such information to explicitly guide candidate-label correction. Meanwhile, directly applying knowledge distillation (KD) to PML is highly vulnerable to noisy supervision during representation learning, which can aggravate error accumulation under overlapping candidate labels. To address these issues, we propose a meta-guided distillation framework for PML that integrates teacher–student learning with nested meta-optimization. Specifically, the teacher is optimized with large-scale noisy data under the guidance of limited clean labels, so that it can learn calibrated probabilistic label semantics and generate corrected soft targets for student training. To make this meta-correction process scalable, a truncated meta-gradient approximation is further adopted to reduce computational overhead. The resulting corrected teacher outputs are then used to drive robust multi-label distillation for the student. Experiments on multiple benchmark multi-label image datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over seven representative PML methods across standard evaluation metrics. These results show that meta-guided calibration effectively reduces semantic ambiguity and mitigates noise-induced error propagation in partial multi-label learning.