Reinforced GNNs for Multiple Instance Learning

Multiple instance learning (MIL) trains models from bags of instances, where each bag contains multiple instances, and only bag-level labels are available for supervision. The application of graph neural networks (GNNs) in capturing intrabag topology effectively improves MIL. Existing GNNs usually require filtering low-confidence edges among instances and adapting graph neural architectures to new bag structures. However, such asynchronous adjustments to structure and architecture are tedious and ignore their correlations. To tackle these issues, we propose a reinforced GNN framework for MIL (RGMIL), pioneering the exploitation of multiagent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) in MIL tasks. MADRL enables the flexible definition or extension of factors that influence bag graphs or GNNs and provides synchronous control over them. Moreover, MADRL explores structure-to-architecture correlations while automating adjustments. Experimental results on multiple MIL datasets demonstrate that RGMIL achieves the best performance with excellent explainability. The code and data are available at https://github.com/RingBDStack/RGMIL.