Tackling Instance-Dependent Label Noise via a Universal Probabilistic Model

No. 11: AAAI-21 Technical Tracks 11

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 35

AAAI Technical Track on Machine Learning IV

The drastic increase of data quantity often brings the severe decrease of data quality, such as incorrect label annotations. It poses a great challenge for robustly training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Existing learning methods with label noise either employ ad-hoc heuristics or restrict to specific noise assumptions. However, more general situations, such as instance-dependent label noise, have not been fully explored, as scarce studies focus on their label corruption process. By categorizing instances into confusing and unconfusing instances, this paper proposes a simple yet universal probabilistic model, which explicitly relates noisy labels to their instances. The resultant model can be realized by DNNs, where the training procedure is accomplished by employing a novel alternating optimization algorithm. Experiments on datasets with both synthetic and real-world label noise verify the proposed method yields significant improvements on robustness over state-of-the-art counterparts.

10.1609/aaai.v35i11.17221