SARI: Simplistic Average and Robust Identification based Noisy Partial Label Learning

Partial label learning (PLL) is a weakly-supervised learning paradigm where each training instance is paired with a set of candidate labels (partial label), one of which is the true label. Noisy PLL (NPLL) relaxes this constraint by allowing some partial labels to not contain the true label, enhancing the practicality of the problem. Our work centers on NPLL and presents a minimalistic framework called SARI that initially assigns pseudo-labels to images by exploiting the noisy partial labels through a weighted nearest neighbour algorithm. These pseudo-label and image pairs are then used to train a deep neural network classifier with label smoothing and standard regularization techniques. The classifier's features and predictions are subsequently employed to refine and enhance the accuracy of pseudo-labels. SARI combines the strengths of Average Based Strategies (in pseudo labelling) and Identification Based Strategies (in classifier training) from the literature. We perform thorough experiments on seven datasets and compare SARI against nine NPLL and PLL methods from the prior art. SARI achieves state-of-the-art results in almost all studied settings, obtaining substantial gains in fine-grained classification and extreme noise settings.