On Generalized Multiple-Instance Learning

We describe a generalisation of the multiple-instance learning model in which a bag's label is not based on a single instance's proximity to a single target point. Rather, a bag is positive if and only if it contains a collection of instances, each near one of a set of target points. We then adapt a learning-theoretic algorithm for learning in this model and present empirical results on data from robot vision, content-based image retrieval, and protein sequence identification.