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1. Fair Weak-Supervised Learning: A Multiple-Instance Learning Approach

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN60899.2024.10651225  

   Dai, Yucong ; Jiang, Xiangyu ; Hu, Yaowei ; Zhang, Lu ; Wu, Yongkai ( June 2024 , IEEE)

   With the prevalence of machine learning in many high-stakes decision-making processes, e.g., hiring and admission, it is important to take fairness into account when practitioners design and deploy machine learning models, especially in scenarios with imperfectly labeled data. Multiple-Instance Learning (MIL) is a weakly supervised approach where instances are grouped in labeled bags, each containing several instances sharing the same label. However, current fairness-centric methods in machine learning often fall short when applied to MIL due to their reliance on instance-level labels. In this work, we introduce a Fair Multiple-Instance Learning (FMIL) framework to ensure fairness in weakly supervised learning. In particular, our method bridges the gap between bag-level and instance-level labeling by leveraging the bag labels, inferring high-confidence instance labels to improve both accuracy and fairness in MIL classifiers. Comprehensive experiments underscore that our FMIL framework substantially reduces biases in MIL without compromising accuracy. 

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2. Label-Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion Models for Learning from Noisy Labels

   Chen, Jian ; Zhang, Ruiyi ; Yu, Tong ; Sharma, Rohan ; Xu, Zhiqiang ; Sun, Tong ; Chen, Changyou ( December 2023 , Curran Associates, Inc.)

   Oh, A ; Naumann, T ; Globerson, A ; Saenko, K ; Hardt, M ; Levine, S (Ed.)

   Learning from noisy labels is a long-standing problem in machine learning for real applications. One of the main research lines focuses on learning a label corrector to purify potential noisy labels. However, these methods typically rely on strict assumptions and are limited to certain types of label noise. In this paper, we reformulate the label-noise problem from a generative-model perspective, i.e., labels are generated by gradually refining an initial random guess. This new perspective immediately enables existing powerful diffusion models to seamlessly learn the stochastic generative process. Once the generative uncertainty is modeled, we can perform classification inference using maximum likelihood estimation of labels. To mitigate the impact of noisy labels, we propose Label-Retrieval- Augmented (LRA) diffusion model 1, which leverages neighbor consistency to effectively construct pseudo-clean labels for diffusion training. Our model is flexible and general, allowing easy incorporation of different types of conditional information, e.g., use of pre-trained models, to further boost model performance. Extensive experiments are conducted for evaluation. Our model achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on all standard real-world benchmark datasets. Remarkably, by incorporating conditional information from the powerful CLIP model, our method can boost the current SOTA accuracy by 10-20 absolute points in many cases. 

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3. Understanding Instance-Level Label Noise: Disparate Impacts and Treatments

   Liu, Yang ( January 2021 , International Conference on Machine Learning)

   null (Ed.)

   This paper aims to provide understandings for the effect of an over-parameterized model, e.g. a deep neural network, memorizing instance-dependent noisy labels. We first quantify the harms caused by memorizing noisy instances, and show the disparate impacts of noisy labels for sample instances with different representation frequencies. We then analyze how several popular solutions for learning with noisy labels mitigate this harm at the instance level. Our analysis reveals that existing approaches lead to disparate treatments when handling noisy instances. While higher-frequency instances often enjoy a high probability of an improvement by applying these solutions, lower-frequency instances do not. Our analysis reveals new understandings for when these approaches work, and provides theoretical justifications for previously reported empirical observations. This observation requires us to rethink the distribution of label noise across instances and calls for different treatments for instances in different regimes. 

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4. Robustness of Conditional GANs to Noisy Labels

   Thekumparampil, Kiran Koshy ; Khetan, Ashish ; Lin, Zinan ; Oh, Sewoong ( December 2018 , Advances in neural information processing systems)

   We study the problem of learning conditional generators from noisy labeled samples, where the labels are corrupted by random noise. A standard training of conditional GANs will not only produce samples with wrong labels, but also generate poor quality samples. We consider two scenarios, depending on whether the noise model is known or not. When the distribution of the noise is known, we introduce a novel architecture which we call Robust Conditional GAN (RCGAN). The main idea is to corrupt the label of the generated sample before feeding to the adversarial discriminator, forcing the generator to produce samples with clean labels. This approach of passing through a matching noisy channel is justified by corresponding multiplicative approximation bounds between the loss of the RCGAN and the distance between the clean real distribution and the generator distribution. This shows that the proposed approach is robust, when used with a carefully chosen discriminator architecture, known as projection discriminator. When the distribution of the noise is not known, we provide an extension of our architecture, which we call RCGAN-U, that learns the noise model simultaneously while training the generator. We show experimentally on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets that both the approaches consistently improve upon baseline approaches, and RCGAN-U closely matches the performance of RCGAN. 

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5. Robustness of conditional GANs to noisy labels

   Thekumparampil, Kiran Koshy ; Khetan, Ashish ; Lin, Zinan ; Oh, Sewoong ( December 2018 , Advances in neural information processing systems)

   We study the problem of learning conditional generators from noisy labeled samples, where the labels are corrupted by random noise. A standard training of conditional GANs will not only produce samples with wrong labels, but also generate poor quality samples. We consider two scenarios, depending on whether the noise model is known or not. When the distribution of the noise is known, we introduce a novel architecture which we call Robust Conditional GAN (RCGAN). The main idea is to corrupt the label of the generated sample before feeding to the adversarial discriminator, forcing the generator to produce samples with clean labels. This approach of passing through a matching noisy channel is justified by accompanying multiplicative approximation bounds between the loss of the RCGAN and the distance between the clean real distribution and the generator distribution. This shows that the proposed approach is robust, when used with a carefully chosen discriminator architecture, known as projection discriminator. When the distribution of the noise is not known, we provide an extension of our architecture, which we call RCGAN-U, that learns the noise model simultaneously while training the generator. We show experimentally on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets that both the approaches consistently improve upon baseline approaches, and RCGAN-U closely matches the performance of RCGAN. 

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