Group Benefits Instances Selection for Data Purification

Manually annotating datasets for training deep models is very labor-intensive and time-consuming. To overcome such inferiority, directly leveraging web images to conduct training data becomes a natural choice. Nevertheless, the presence of label noise in web data usually degrades the model performance. Existing methods for combating label noise are typically designed and tested on synthetic noisy datasets. However, they tend to fail to achieve satisfying results on real-world noisy datasets. To this end, we propose a method named GRIP to alleviate the noisy label problem for both synthetic and real-world datasets. Specifically, GRIP utilizes a group regularization strategy that estimates class soft labels to improve noise robustness. Soft label supervision reduces overfitting on noisy labels and learns inter-class similarities to benefit classification. Furthermore, an instance purification operation globally identifies noisy labels by measuring the difference between each training sample and its class soft label. Through operations at both group and instance levels, our approach integrates the advantages of noise-robust and noise-cleaning methods and remarkably alleviates the performance degradation caused by noisy labels. Comprehensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of GRIP over the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Adaptive Integration of Partial Label Learning and Negative Learning for Enhanced Noisy Label Learning

There has been significant attention devoted to the effectiveness of various domains, such as semi-supervised learning, contrastive learning, and meta-learning, in enhancing the performance of methods for noisy label learning (NLL) tasks. However, most existing methods still depend on prior assumptions regarding clean samples amidst different sources of noise (\eg, a pre-defined drop rate or a small subset of clean samples). In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful idea called \textbf{NPN}, which revolutionizes \textbf{N}oisy label learning by integrating \textbf{P}artial label learning (PLL) and \textbf{N}egative learning (NL). Toward this goal, we initially decompose the given label space adaptively into the candidate and complementary labels, thereby establishing the conditions for PLL and NL. We propose two adaptive data-driven paradigms of label disambiguation for PLL: hard disambiguation and soft disambiguation. Furthermore, we generate reliable complementary labels using all non-candidate labels for NL to enhance model robustness through indirect supervision. To maintain label reliability during the later stage of model training, we introduce a consistency regularization term that encourages agreement between the outputs of multiple augmentations. Experiments conducted on both synthetically corrupted and real-world noisy datasets demonstrate the superiority of NPN compared to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The source code has been made available at {\color{purple}{\url{https://github.com/NUST-Machine-Intelligence-Laboratory/NPN}}}.