No Arabic abstract
The label noise transition matrix $T$, reflecting the probabilities that true labels flip into noisy ones, is of vital importance to model label noise and design statistically consistent classifiers. The traditional transition matrix is limited to model closed-set label noise, where noisy training data has true class labels within the noisy label set. It is unfitted to employ such a transition matrix to model open-set label noise, where some true class labels are outside the noisy label set. Thus when considering a more realistic situation, i.e., both closed-set and open-set label noise occurs, existing methods will undesirably give biased solutions. Besides, the traditional transition matrix is limited to model instance-independent label noise, which may not perform well in practice. In this paper, we focus on learning under the mixed closed-set and open-set label noise. We address the aforementioned issues by extending the traditional transition matrix to be able to model mixed label noise, and further to the cluster-dependent transition matrix to better approximate the instance-dependent label noise in real-world applications. We term the proposed transition matrix as the cluster-dependent extended transition matrix. An unbiased estimator (i.e., extended $T$-estimator) has been designed to estimate the cluster-dependent extended transition matrix by only exploiting the noisy data. Comprehensive synthetic and real experiments validate that our method can better model the mixed label noise, following its more robust performance than the prior state-of-the-art label-noise learning methods.
The problem of open-set noisy labels denotes that part of training data have a different label space that does not contain the true class. Lots of approaches, e.g., loss correction and label correction, cannot handle such open-set noisy labels well, since they need training data and test data to share the same label space, which does not hold for learning with open-set noisy labels. The state-of-the-art methods thus employ the sample selection approach to handle open-set noisy labels, which tries to select clean data from noisy data for network parameters updates. The discarded data are seen to be mislabeled and do not participate in training. Such an approach is intuitive and reasonable at first glance. However, a natural question could be raised can such data only be discarded during training?. In this paper, we show that the answer is no. Specifically, we discuss that the instances of discarded data could consist of some meaningful information for generalization. For this reason, we do not abandon such data, but use instance correction to modify the instances of the discarded data, which makes the predictions for the discarded data consistent with given labels. Instance correction are performed by targeted adversarial attacks. The corrected data are then exploited for training to help generalization. In addition to the analytical results, a series of empirical evidences are provided to justify our claims.
Traditional supervised learning aims to train a classifier in the closed-set world, where training and test samples share the same label space. In this paper, we target a more challenging and realistic setting: open-set learning (OSL), where there exist test samples from the classes that are unseen during training. Although researchers have designed many methods from the algorithmic perspectives, there are few methods that provide generalization guarantees on their ability to achieve consistent performance on different training samples drawn from the same distribution. Motivated by the transfer learning and probably approximate correct (PAC) theory, we make a bold attempt to study OSL by proving its generalization error-given training samples with size n, the estimation error will get close to order O_p(1/sqrt{n}). This is the first study to provide a generalization bound for OSL, which we do by theoretically investigating the risk of the target classifier on unknown classes. According to our theory, a novel algorithm, called auxiliary open-set risk (AOSR) is proposed to address the OSL problem. Experiments verify the efficacy of AOSR. The code is available at github.com/Anjin-Liu/Openset_Learning_AOSR.
In open set learning, a model must be able to generalize to novel classes when it encounters a sample that does not belong to any of the classes it has seen before. Open set learning poses a realistic learning scenario that is receiving growing attention. Existing studies on open set learning mainly focused on detecting novel classes, but few studies tried to model them for differentiating novel classes. In this paper, we recognize that novel classes should be different from each other, and propose distribution networks for open set learning that can model different novel classes based on probability distributions. We hypothesize that, through a certain mapping, samples from different classes with the same classification criterion should follow different probability distributions from the same distribution family. A deep neural network is learned to map the samples in the original feature space to a latent space where the distributions of known classes can be jointly learned with the network. We additionally propose a distribution parameter transfer and updating strategy for novel class modeling when a novel class is detected in the latent space. By novel class modeling, the detected novel classes can serve as known classes to the subsequent classification. Our experimental results on image datasets MNIST and CIFAR10 show that the distribution networks can detect novel classes accurately, and model them well for the subsequent classification tasks.
Active Learning is essential for more label-efficient deep learning. Bayesian Active Learning has focused on BALD, which reduces model parameter uncertainty. However, we show that BALD gets stuck on out-of-distribution or junk data that is not relevant for the task. We examine a novel *Expected Predictive Information Gain (EPIG)* to deal with distribution shifts of the pool set. EPIG reduces the uncertainty of *predictions* on an unlabelled *evaluation set* sampled from the test data distribution whose distribution might be different to the pool set distribution. Based on this, our new EPIG-BALD acquisition function for Bayesian Neural Networks selects samples to improve the performance on the test data distribution instead of selecting samples that reduce model uncertainty everywhere, including for out-of-distribution regions with low density in the test data distribution. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art Bayesian active learning methods on high-dimensional datasets and avoids out-of-distribution junk data in cases where current state-of-the-art methods fail.
Deep Learning systems have shown tremendous accuracy in image classification, at the cost of big image datasets. Collecting such amounts of data can lead to labelling errors in the training set. Indexing multimedia content for retrieval, classification or recommendation can involve tagging or classification based on multiple criteria. In our case, we train face recognition systems for actors identification with a closed set of identities while being exposed to a significant number of perturbators (actors unknown to our database). Face classifiers are known to be sensitive to label noise. We review recent works on how to manage noisy annotations when training deep learning classifiers, independently from our interest in face recognition.