No Arabic abstract
Collecting large-scale data with clean labels for supervised training of neural networks is practically challenging. Although noisy labels are usually cheap to acquire, existing methods suffer a lot from label noise. This paper targets at the challenge of robust training at high label noise regimes. The key insight to achieve this goal is to wisely leverage a small trusted set to estimate exemplar weights and pseudo labels for noisy data in order to reuse them for supervised training. We present a holistic framework to train deep neural networks in a way that is highly invulnerable to label noise. Our method sets the new state of the art on various types of label noise and achieves excellent performance on large-scale datasets with real-world label noise. For instance, on CIFAR100 with a $40%$ uniform noise ratio and only 10 trusted labeled data per class, our method achieves $80.2{pm}0.3%$ classification accuracy, where the error rate is only $1.4%$ higher than a neural network trained without label noise. Moreover, increasing the noise ratio to $80%$, our method still maintains a high accuracy of $75.5{pm}0.2%$, compared to the previous best accuracy $48.2%$. Source code available: https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/ieg
Large scale image classification datasets often contain noisy labels. We take a principled probabilistic approach to modelling input-dependent, also known as heteroscedastic, label noise in these datasets. We place a multivariate Normal distributed latent variable on the final hidden layer of a neural network classifier. The covariance matrix of this latent variable, models the aleatoric uncertainty due to label noise. We demonstrate that the learned covariance structure captures known sources of label noise between semantically similar and co-occurring classes. Compared to standard neural network training and other baselines, we show significantly improved accuracy on Imagenet ILSVRC 2012 79.3% (+2.6%), Imagenet-21k 47.0% (+1.1%) and JFT 64.7% (+1.6%). We set a new state-of-the-art result on WebVision 1.0 with 76.6% top-1 accuracy. These datasets range from over 1M to over 300M training examples and from 1k classes to more than 21k classes. Our method is simple to use, and we provide an implementation that is a drop-in replacement for the final fully-connected layer in a deep classifier.
In this paper, we address the problem of training deep neural networks in the presence of severe label noise. Our proposed training algorithm ScanMix, combines semantic clustering with semi-supervised learning (SSL) to improve the feature representations and enable an accurate identification of noisy samples, even in severe label noise scenarios. To be specific, ScanMix is designed based on the expectation maximisation (EM) framework, where the E-step estimates the value of a latent variable to cluster the training images based on their appearance representations and classification results, and the M-step optimises the SSL classification and learns effective feature representations via semantic clustering. In our evaluations, we show state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks for symmetric, asymmetric and semantic label noise on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, as well as large scale real label noise on WebVision. Most notably, for the benchmarks contaminated with large noise rates (80% and above), our results are up to 27% better than the related work. The code is available at https://github.com/ragavsachdeva/ScanMix.
Advances in neural network based classifiers have transformed automatic feature learning from a pipe dream of stronger AI to a routine and expected property of practical systems. Since the emergence of AlexNet every winning submission of the ImageNet challenge has employed end-to-end representation learning, and due to the utility of good representations for transfer learning, representation learning has become as an important and distinct task from supervised learning. At present, this distinction is inconsequential, as supervised methods are state-of-the-art in learning transferable representations. But recent work has shown that generative models can also be powerful agents of representation learning. Will the representations learned from these generative methods ever rival the quality of those from their supervised competitors? In this work, we argue in the affirmative, that from an information theoretic perspective, generative models have greater potential for representation learning. Based on several experimentally validated assumptions, we show that supervised learning is upper bounded in its capacity for representation learning in ways that certain generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are not. We hope that our analysis will provide a rigorous motivation for further exploration of generative representation learning.
Label noise is frequently observed in real-world large-scale datasets. The noise is introduced due to a variety of reasons; it is heterogeneous and feature-dependent. Most existing approaches to handling noisy labels fall into two categories: they either assume an ideal feature-independent noise, or remain heuristic without theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we propose to target a new family of feature-dependent label noise, which is much more general than commonly used i.i.d. label noise and encompasses a broad spectrum of noise patterns. Focusing on this general noise family, we propose a progressive label correction algorithm that iteratively corrects labels and refines the model. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that for a wide variety of (unknown) noise patterns, a classifier trained with this strategy converges to be consistent with the Bayes classifier. In experiments, our method outperforms SOTA baselines and is robust to various noise types and levels.
Learning with the textit{instance-dependent} label noise is challenging, because it is hard to model such real-world noise. Note that there are psychological and physiological evidences showing that we humans perceive instances by decomposing them into parts. Annotators are therefore more likely to annotate instances based on the parts rather than the whole instances, where a wrong mapping from parts to classes may cause the instance-dependent label noise. Motivated by this human cognition, in this paper, we approximate the instance-dependent label noise by exploiting textit{part-dependent} label noise. Specifically, since instances can be approximately reconstructed by a combination of parts, we approximate the instance-dependent textit{transition matrix} for an instance by a combination of the transition matrices for the parts of the instance. The transition matrices for parts can be learned by exploiting anchor points (i.e., data points that belong to a specific class almost surely). Empirical evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate our method is superior to the state-of-the-art approaches for learning from the instance-dependent label noise.