Title
A Second-Order Approach to Learning with Instance-Dependent Label Noise
Abstract
The presence of label noise often misleads the training of deep neural networks. Departing from the recent literature which largely assumes the label noise rate is only determined by the true label class, the errors in human-annotated labels are more likely to be dependent on the difficulty levels of tasks, resulting in settings with instance-dependent label noise. We first provide evidences that the heterogeneous instance-dependent label noise is effectively downweighting the examples with higher noise rates in a non-uniform way and thus causes imbalances, rendering the strategy of directly applying methods for class-dependent label noise questionable. Built on a recent work peer loss [24], we then propose and study the potentials of a second-order approach that leverages the estimation of several covariance terms defined between the instance-dependent noise rates and the Bayes optimal label. We show that this set of second-order statistics successfully captures the induced imbalances. We further proceed to show that with the help of the estimated second-order statistics, we identify a new loss function whose expected risk of a classifier under instance-dependent label noise is equivalent to a new problem with only class-dependent label noise. This fact allows us to apply existing solutions to handle this better-studied setting. We provide an efficient procedure to estimate these second-order statistics without accessing either ground truth labels or prior knowledge of the noise rates. Experiments on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 with synthetic instance-dependent label noise and Clothing1M with real-world human label noise verify our approach.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/CVPR46437.2021.00998
2021 IEEE/CVF CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER VISION AND PATTERN RECOGNITION, CVPR 2021
DocType
ISSN
Citations 
Conference
1063-6919
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhaowei Zhu112.37
Tongliang Liu222.42
Yang Liu38320.95