Noisy labels, resulting from mistakes in manual labeling or webly data collecting for supervised learning, can cause neural networks to overfit the misleading information and degrade the generalization performance. Self-supervised learning works in the absence of labels and thus eliminates the negative impact of noisy labels. Motivated by co-training with both supervised learning view and self-supervised learning view, we propose a simple yet effective method called Co-learning for learning with noisy labels. Co-learning performs supervised learning and self-supervised learning in a cooperative way. The constraints of intrinsic similarity with the self-supervised module and the structural similarity with the noisily-supervised module are imposed on a shared common feature encoder to regularize the network to maximize the agreement between the two constraints. Co-learning is compared with peer methods on corrupted data from benchmark datasets fairly, and extensive results are provided which demonstrate that Co-learning is superior to many state-of-the-art approaches.
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Brain-Inspired Technology Co., Ltd.（脑启发技术有限公司）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）
Learning with noisy labels has attracted a lot of attention in recent years, where the mainstream approaches are in pointwise manners. Meanwhile, pairwise manners have shown great potential in supervised metric learning and unsupervised contrastive learning. Thus, a natural question is raised: does learning in a pairwise manner mitigate label noise? To give an affirmative answer, in this paper, we propose a framework called Class2Simi: it transforms data points with noisy class labels to data pairs with noisy similarity labels, where a similarity label denotes whether a pair shares the class l…
Addressing Long-Tail Noisy Label Learning Problems: a Two-Stage Solution with Label Refurbishment Considering Label Rarity
College of Artificial Intelligence and Green Energy, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国立阳明交通大学人工智慧与绿色能源学院）；University at Albany, SUNY（纽约州立大学奥尔巴尼分校）
Learning with noisy labels has gained the enormous interest in the robust deep learning area. Recent studies have empirically disclosed that utilizing dual networks can enhance the performance of single network but without theoretic proof. In this paper, we propose Cooperative Learning (CooL) framework for noisy supervision that analytically explains the effects of leveraging dual or multiple networks. Specifically, the simple but efficient combination in CooL yields a more reliable risk minimization for unseen clean data. A range of experiments have been conducted on several benchmarks with b…
The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）
The recent advanced deep learning techniques have shown the promising results in various domains such as computer vision and natural language processing. The success of deep neural networks in supervised learning heavily relies on a large amount of labeled data. However, obtaining labeled data with target labels is often challenging due to various reasons such as cost of labeling and privacy issues, which challenges existing deep models. In spite of that, it is relatively easy to obtain data with \textit{inexact supervision}, i.e., having labels/tags related to the target task. For example, so…
Trusted Multi-view Learning under Noisy Supervision
School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）；State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机辅助设计与图形学国家重点实验室）；Amazon Alexa AI（亚马逊Alexa人工智能）
Pohang University of Science and Technology（浦项科技大学）；Seoul National University of Science and Technology (SeoulTech)（首尔国立科技大学（首尔科技大学））
Because deep learning is vulnerable to noisy labels, sample selection techniques, which train networks with only clean labeled data, have attracted a great attention. However, if the labels are dominantly corrupted by few classes, these noisy samples are called dominant-noisy-labeled samples, the network also learns dominant-noisy-labeled samples rapidly via content-aware optimization. In this study, we propose a compelling criteria to penalize dominant-noisy-labeled samples intensively through class-wise penalty labels. By averaging prediction confidences for the each observed label, we obtai…
Weak supervision (WS) is an alternative to the traditional supervised learning to address the need for ground truth. Data programming is a practical WS approach that allows programmatic labeling data samples using labeling functions (LFs) instead of hand-labeling each data point. However, the existing approach fails to fully exploit the domain knowledge encoded into LFs, especially when the LFs' coverage is low. This is due to the common data programming pipeline that neglects to utilize data features during the generative process. This paper proposes a new approach called reinforced labeling …
In machine learning the best performance on a certain task is achieved by fully supervised methods when perfect ground truth labels are available. However, labels are often noisy, especially in remote sensing where manually curated public datasets are rare. We study the multi-modal cadaster map alignment problem for which available annotations are mis-aligned polygons, resulting in noisy supervision. We subsequently set up a multiple-rounds training scheme which corrects the ground truth annotations at each round to better train the model at the next round. We show that it is possible to reduc…
University of Tokyo（东京大学）；NTT Communication Science Laboratories（NTT通信科学实验室）
Positive-unlabeled learning refers to the process of training a binary classifier using only positive and unlabeled data. Although unlabeled data can contain positive data, all unlabeled data are regarded as negative data in existing positive-unlabeled learning methods, which resulting in diminishing performance. We provide a new perspective on this problem -- considering unlabeled data as noisy-labeled data, and introducing a new formulation of PU learning as a problem of joint optimization of noisy-labeled data. This research presents a methodology that assigns initial pseudo-labels to unlab…
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）
With the widespread use of machine learning for classification, it becomes increasingly important to be able to use weaker kinds of supervision for tasks in which it is hard to obtain standard labeled data. One such kind of supervision is provided pairwise---in the form of Similar (S) pairs (if two examples belong to the same class) and Dissimilar (D) pairs (if two examples belong to different classes). This kind of supervision is realistic in privacy-sensitive domains. Although this problem has been looked at recently, it is unclear how to learn from such supervision under label noise, which …
We present an architecture for information extraction from text that augments an existing parser with a character-level neural network. The network is trained using a measure of consistency of extracted data with existing databases as a form of noisy supervision. Our architecture combines the ability of constraint-based information extraction systems to easily incorporate domain knowledge and constraints with the ability of deep neural networks to leverage large amounts of data to learn complex features. Boosting the existing parser's precision, the system led to large improvements over a matu…
Towards the Identifiability in Noisy Label Learning: A Multinomial Mixture Modelling Approach
Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey, United Kingdom（视觉、语音和信号处理中心，萨里大学，英国）；Department of Data Science and AI, Monash University, Australia（数据科学与人工智能系，莫纳什大学，澳大利亚）
The rawly collected training data often comes with separate noisy labels collected from multiple imperfect annotators (e.g., via crowdsourcing). A typical way of using these separate labels is to first aggregate them into one and apply standard training methods. The literature has also studied extensively on effective aggregation approaches. This paper revisits this choice and aims to provide an answer to the question of whether one should aggregate separate noisy labels into single ones or use them separately as given. We theoretically analyze the performance of both approaches under the empi…
The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown their great ability in modeling graph structured data. However, real-world graphs usually contain structure noises and have limited labeled nodes. The performance of GNNs would drop significantly when trained on such graphs, which hinders the adoption of GNNs on many applications. Thus, it is important to develop noise-resistant GNNs with limited labeled nodes. However, the work on this is rather limited. Therefore, we study a novel problem of developing robust GNNs on noisy graphs with limited labeled nodes. Our analysis shows that both the noisy edges …
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Takeda Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd.（武田药品工业株式会社）
Data lies at the core of modern deep learning. The impressive performance of supervised learning is built upon a base of massive accurately labeled data. However, in some real-world applications, accurate labeling might not be viable; instead, multiple noisy labels (instead of one accurate label) are provided by several annotators for each data sample. Learning a classifier on such a noisy training dataset is a challenging task. Previous approaches usually assume that all data samples share the same set of parameters related to annotator errors, while we demonstrate that label error learning s…
University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）；Brown University（布朗大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；RIKEN AIP（理化学研究所人工智能研究中心）；University of Tokyo（东京大学）
Label smoothing (LS) is an arising learning paradigm that uses the positively weighted average of both the hard training labels and uniformly distributed soft labels. It was shown that LS serves as a regularizer for training data with hard labels and therefore improves the generalization of the model. Later it was reported LS even helps with improving robustness when learning with noisy labels. However, we observed that the advantage of LS vanishes when we operate in a high label noise regime. Intuitively speaking, this is due to the increased entropy of $\mathbb{P}(\text{noisy label}|X)$ when…
Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) become frail when the datasets contain noisy (incorrect) class labels. Robust techniques in the presence of noisy labels can be categorized into two folds: developing noise-robust functions or using noise-cleansing methods by detecting the noisy data. Recently, noise-cleansing methods have been considered as the most competitive noisy-label learning algorithms. Despite their success, their noisy label detectors are often based on heuristics more than a theory, requiring a robust classifier to predict the noisy data with loss values. In this paper, we propose …
University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Meituan（美团）
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…
College of Information Science and Engineering（信息科学与工程学院）；Department of Automation（自动化系）
Real world datasets often contain noisy labels, and learning from such datasets using standard classification approaches may not produce the desired performance. In this paper, we propose a Gaussian Mixture Discriminant Analysis (GMDA) with noisy label for each class. We introduce flipping probability and class probability and use EM algorithms to solve the discriminant problem with label noise. We also provide the detail proofs of convergence. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed approach notably outperforms other four state-of-art methods.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) provide excellent performance when used for image classification. The classical method of training CNNs is by labeling images in a supervised manner as in "input image belongs to this label" (Positive Learning; PL), which is a fast and accurate method if the labels are assigned correctly to all images. However, if inaccurate labels, or noisy labels, exist, training with PL will provide wrong information, thus severely degrading performance. To address this issue, we start with an indirect learning method called Negative Learning (NL), in which the CNNs are …
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；VIVO AI Lab（vivo人工智能实验室）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
For multi-class classification under class-conditional label noise, we prove that the accuracy metric itself can be robust. We concretize this finding's inspiration in two essential aspects: training and validation, with which we address critical issues in learning with noisy labels. For training, we show that maximizing training accuracy on sufficiently many noisy samples yields an approximately optimal classifier. For validation, we prove that a noisy validation set is reliable, addressing the critical demand of model selection in scenarios like hyperparameter-tuning and early stopping. Prev…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）
Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in various applications. To learn an effective policy for the agent, it usually requires a huge amount of data by interacting with the environment, which could be computational costly and time consuming. To overcome this challenge, the framework called Reinforcement Learning with Expert Demonstrations (RLED) was proposed to exploit the supervision from expert demonstrations. Although the RLED methods can reduce the number of learning iterations, they usually assume the demonstrations are perfect, and thus may be seriously misled by the noisy de…
Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学音乐技术组）；Google, Inc.（谷歌公司）
This paper introduces Task 2 of the DCASE2019 Challenge, titled "Audio tagging with noisy labels and minimal supervision". This task was hosted on the Kaggle platform as "Freesound Audio Tagging 2019". The task evaluates systems for multi-label audio tagging using a large set of noisy-labeled data, and a much smaller set of manually-labeled data, under a large vocabulary setting of 80 everyday sound classes. In addition, the proposed dataset poses an acoustic mismatch problem between the noisy train set and the test set due to the fact that they come from different web audio sources. This can …
A popular approach to decrease the need for costly manual annotation of large data sets is weak supervision, which introduces problems of noisy labels, coverage and bias. Methods for overcoming these problems have either relied on discriminative models, trained with cost functions specific to weak supervision, and more recently, generative models, trying to model the output of the automatic annotation process. In this work, we explore a novel direction of generative modeling for weak supervision: Instead of modeling the output of the annotation process (the labeling function matches), we gener…
The lack of labeled training data has limited the development of natural language processing tools, such as named entity recognition, for many languages spoken in developing countries. Techniques such as distant and weak supervision can be used to create labeled data in a (semi-) automatic way. Additionally, to alleviate some of the negative effects of the errors in automatic annotation, noise-handling methods can be integrated. Pretrained word embeddings are another key component of most neural named entity classifiers. With the advent of more complex contextual word embeddings, an interestin…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Tokyo（东京大学）
It is important to learn various types of classifiers given training data with noisy labels. Noisy labels, in the most popular noise model hitherto, are corrupted from ground-truth labels by an unknown noise transition matrix. Thus, by estimating this matrix, classifiers can escape from overfitting those noisy labels. However, such estimation is practically difficult, due to either the indirect nature of two-step approaches, or not big enough data to afford end-to-end approaches. In this paper, we propose a human-assisted approach called Masking that conveys human cognition of invalid class tr…
Reliable Programmatic Weak Supervision with Confidence Intervals for Label Probabilities
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)（麻省理工学院）；BCAM-Basque Center for Applied Mathematics（BCAM应用数学巴斯克中心）；IKERBASQUE-Basque Foundation for Science（IKERBASQUE巴斯克科学基金会）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
Supervised learning algorithms are heavily reliant on annotated datasets to train machine learning models. However, the curation of the annotated datasets is laborious and time consuming due to the manual effort involved and has become a huge bottleneck in supervised learning. In this work, we apply the theory of noisy learning to generate weak supervision signals instead of manual annotation. We curate a noisy labeled dataset using a labeling heuristic to identify epidemic related tweets. We evaluated the performance using a large epidemic corpus and our results demonstrate that models traine…
One-step abductive multi-target learning (OSAMTL) was proposed to handle complex noisy labels. In this paper, giving definition of diverse noisy label samples (DNLS), we propose one-step abductive multi-target learning with DNLS (OSAMTL-DNLS) to expand the methodology of original OSAMTL to better handle complex noisy labels.
Georgia Tech（佐治亚理工学院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
To reduce the human annotation efforts, the programmatic weak supervision (PWS) paradigm abstracts weak supervision sources as labeling functions (LFs) and involves a label model to aggregate the output of multiple LFs to produce training labels. Most existing label models require a parameter learning step for each dataset. In this work, we present a hyper label model that (once learned) infers the ground-truth labels for each dataset in a single forward pass without dataset-specific parameter learning. The hyper label model approximates an optimal analytical (yet computationally intractable) …
Annotating the dataset with high-quality labels is crucial for performance of deep network, but in real world scenarios, the labels are often contaminated by noise. To address this, some methods were proposed to automatically split clean and noisy labels, and learn a semi-supervised learner in a Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) framework. However, they leverage a handcrafted module for clean-noisy label splitting, which induces a confirmation bias in the semi-supervised learning phase and limits the performance. In this paper, we for the first time present a learnable module for clean-noisy la…
Multi-label classification (MLC) is a generalization of standard classification where multiple labels may be assigned to a given sample. In the real world, it is more common to deal with noisy datasets than clean datasets, given how modern datasets are labeled by a large group of annotators on crowdsourcing platforms, but little attention has been given to evaluating multi-label classifiers with noisy labels. Exploiting label correlations now becomes a standard component of a multi-label classifier to achieve competitive performance. However, this component makes the classifier more prone to p…
ING Wholesale Banking Advanced Analytics（ING批发银行高级分析部）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Feebris（Feebris公司）
The availability of labelled data is one of the main limitations in machine learning. We can alleviate this using weak supervision: a framework that uses expert-defined rules $\boldsymbolλ$ to estimate probabilistic labels $p(y|\boldsymbolλ)$ for the entire data set. These rules, however, are dependent on what experts know about the problem, and hence may be inaccurate or may fail to capture important parts of the problem-space. To mitigate this, we propose Active WeaSuL: an approach that incorporates active learning into weak supervision. In Active WeaSuL, experts do not only define rules, bu…
Deep neural networks are prone to overfitting noisy labels, resulting in poor generalization performance. To overcome this problem, we present a simple and effective method self-ensemble label correction (SELC) to progressively correct noisy labels and refine the model. We look deeper into the memorization behavior in training with noisy labels and observe that the network outputs are reliable in the early stage. To retain this reliable knowledge, SELC uses ensemble predictions formed by an exponential moving average of network outputs to update the original noisy labels. We show that training…
VRPO: Rethinking Value Modeling for Robust RL under Noisy Supervision in LLM Post-Training
College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）；Honor Device Co., Ltd（荣耀设备有限公司）；Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI, Fudan University（复旦大学可信具身人工智能研究院）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multimodal Embodied AI（上海多模态具身人工智能重点实验室）
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Due to the cost of labeling nodes, classifying a node in a sparsely labeled graph while maintaining the prediction accuracy deserves attention. The key point is how the algorithm learns sufficient information from more neighbors with different hop distances. This study first proposes a hop-aware attention supervision mechanism for the node classification task. A simulated annealing learning strategy is then adopted to balance two learning tasks, node classification and the hop-aware attention coefficients, along the training timeline. Compared with state-of-the-art models, the experimental res…
Estimating Noisy Class Posterior with Part-level Labels for Noisy Label Learning
School of Physics, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学物理学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Distance Education, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学远程教育学院）
Recently deep neural networks have shown their capacity to memorize training data, even with noisy labels, which hurts generalization performance. To mitigate this issue, we provide a simple but effective baseline method that is robust to noisy labels, even with severe noise. Our objective involves a variance regularization term that implicitly penalizes the Jacobian norm of the neural network on the whole training set (including the noisy-labeled data), which encourages generalization and prevents overfitting to the corrupted labels. Experiments on both synthetically generated incorrect label…
The memorization effect of deep learning hinders its performance to effectively generalize on test set when learning with noisy labels. Prior study has discovered that epistemic uncertainty techniques are robust when trained with noisy labels compared with neural networks without uncertainty estimation. They obtain prolonged memorization effect and better generalization performance under the adversarial setting of noisy labels. Due to its superior performance amongst other selected epistemic uncertainty methods under noisy labels, we focus on Monte Carlo Dropout (MCDropout) and investigate why…
As machine learning models continue to increase in complexity, collecting large hand-labeled training sets has become one of the biggest roadblocks in practice. Instead, weaker forms of supervision that provide noisier but cheaper labels are often used. However, these weak supervision sources have diverse and unknown accuracies, may output correlated labels, and may label different tasks or apply at different levels of granularity. We propose a framework for integrating and modeling such weak supervision sources by viewing them as labeling different related sub-tasks of a problem, which we ref…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Waseda University（早稻田大学）
Programmatic Weak Supervision (PWS) has emerged as a widespread paradigm to synthesize training labels efficiently. The core component of PWS is the label model, which infers true labels by aggregating the outputs of multiple noisy supervision sources abstracted as labeling functions (LFs). Existing statistical label models typically rely only on the outputs of LF, ignoring the instance features when modeling the underlying generative process. In this paper, we attempt to incorporate the instance features into a statistical label model via the proposed FABLE. In particular, it is built on a mi…
MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Northwestern University（西北大学）
Existing weak supervision approaches use all the data covered by weak signals to train a classifier. We show both theoretically and empirically that this is not always optimal. Intuitively, there is a tradeoff between the amount of weakly-labeled data and the precision of the weak labels. We explore this tradeoff by combining pretrained data representations with the cut statistic (Muhlenbach et al., 2004) to select (hopefully) high-quality subsets of the weakly-labeled training data. Subset selection applies to any label model and classifier and is very simple to plug in to existing weak super…
Leveraging weak or noisy supervision for building effective machine learning models has long been an important research problem. Its importance has further increased recently due to the growing need for large-scale datasets to train deep learning models. Weak or noisy supervision could originate from multiple sources including non-expert annotators or automatic labeling based on heuristics or user interaction signals. There is an extensive amount of previous work focusing on leveraging noisy labels. Most notably, recent work has shown impressive gains by using a meta-learned instance re-weight…
TU Delft（代尔夫特理工大学）；ABB Future Labs（ABB未来实验室）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
Today's available datasets in the wild, e.g., from social media and open platforms, present tremendous opportunities and challenges for deep learning, as there is a significant portion of tagged images, but often with noisy, i.e. erroneous, labels. Recent studies improve the robustness of deep models against noisy labels without the knowledge of true labels. In this paper, we advocate to derive a stronger classifier which proactively makes use of the noisy labels in addition to the original images - turning noisy labels into learning features. To such an end, we propose a novel framework, Expe…
University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Brain-Inspired Technology Co., Ltd.（脑启发科技有限公司）
A similarity label indicates whether two instances belong to the same class while a class label shows the class of the instance. Without class labels, a multi-class classifier could be learned from similarity-labeled pairwise data by meta classification learning. However, since the similarity label is less informative than the class label, it is more likely to be noisy. Deep neural networks can easily remember noisy data, leading to overfitting in classification. In this paper, we propose a method for learning from only noisy-similarity-labeled data. Specifically, to model the noise, we employ…
UiT The Arctic University of Norway（挪威北极大学）；Universidad Rey Juan Carlos（胡安·卡洛斯国王大学）
Noisy labeled data represent a rich source of information that often are easily accessible and cheap to obtain, but label noise might also have many negative consequences if not accounted for. How to fully utilize noisy labels has been studied extensively within the framework of standard supervised machine learning over a period of several decades. However, very little research has been conducted on solving the challenge posed by noisy labels in non-standard settings. This includes situations where only a fraction of the samples are labeled (semi-supervised) and each high-dimensional sample is…
Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
Deep neural networks (DNNs) can fit (or even over-fit) the training data very well. If a DNN model is trained using data with noisy labels and tested on data with clean labels, the model may perform poorly. This paper studies the problem of learning with noisy labels for sentence-level sentiment classification. We propose a novel DNN model called NetAb (as shorthand for convolutional neural Networks with Ab-networks) to handle noisy labels during training. NetAb consists of two convolutional neural networks, one with a noise transition layer for dealing with the input noisy labels and the othe…
