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Imperfect labels are ubiquitous in real-world datasets. Several recent successful methods for training deep neural networks (DNNs) robust to label noise have used two primary techniques: filtering samples based on loss during a warm-up phase to curate an initial set of cleanly labeled samples, and using the output of a network as a pseudo-label for subsequent loss calculations. In this paper, we evaluate different augmentation strategies for algorithms tackling the "learning with noisy labels" problem. We propose and examine multiple augmentation strategies and evaluate them using synthetic datasets based on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, as well as on the real-world dataset Clothing1M. Due to several commonalities in these algorithms, we find that using one set of augmentations for loss modeling tasks and another set for learning is the most effective, improving results on the state-of-the-art and other previous methods. Furthermore, we find that applying augmentation during the warm-up period can negatively impact the loss convergence behavior of correctly versus incorrectly labeled samples. We introduce this augmentation strategy to the state-of-the-art technique and demonstrate that we can improve performance across all evaluated noise levels. In particular, we improve accuracy on the CIFAR-10 benchmark at 90% symmetric noise by more than 15% in absolute accuracy, and we also improve performance on the Clothing1M dataset.
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Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved tremendous success in a variety of applications across many disciplines. Yet, their superior performance comes with the expensive cost of requiring correctly annotated large-scale datasets. Moreover, due to DNNs’ rich capacity, errors in training labels can hamper performance. To combat this problem, mean absolute error (MAE) has recently been proposed as a noise-robust alternative to the commonly-used categorical cross entropy (CCE) loss. However, as we show in this paper, MAE can perform poorly with DNNs and challenging datasets. Here, we present a theoretically grounded set of noise-robust loss functions that can be seen as a generalization of MAE and CCE. Proposed loss functions can be readily applied with any existing DNN architecture and algorithm, while yielding good performance in a wide range of noisy label scenarios. We report results from experiments conducted with CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and FASHIONMNIST datasets and synthetically generated noisy labels.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1748377
- PAR ID:
- 10083366
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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