Existing research on learning with noisy labels mainly focuses on synthetic label noise. Synthetic label noise, though has clean structures which greatly enable statistical analyses, often fails to model the real-world noise patterns. The recent literature has observed several efforts to offer real-world noisy datasets, e.g., Food-101N, WebVision, and Clothing1M. Yet the existing efforts suffer from two caveats: firstly, the lack of ground-truth verification makes it hard to theoretically study the property and treatment of real-world label noise. Secondly, these efforts are often of large scales, which may result in unfair comparisons of robust methods within reasonable and accessible computation power. To better understand real-world label noise, it is important to establish controllable and moderate-sized real-world noisy datasets with both ground-truth and noisy labels. This work presents two new benchmark datasets, which we name as CIFAR-10N, CIFAR-100N, equipping the training datasets of CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 with human-annotated real-world noisy labels that we collect from Amazon Mechanical Turk. We quantitatively and qualitatively show that real-world noisy labels follow an instance-dependent pattern rather than the classically assumed and adopted ones (e.g., class-dependent label noise). We then initiate an effort to benchmark a subset of the existing solutions using CIFAR-10N and CIFAR-100N. We further proceed to study the memorization of correct and wrong predictions, which further illustrates the difference between human noise and class-dependent synthetic noise. We show indeed the real-world noise patterns impose new and outstanding challenges as compared to synthetic label noise. These observations require us to rethink the treatment of noisy labels, and we hope the availability of these two datasets would facilitate the development and evaluation of future learning with noisy label solutions. The corresponding datasets and the leaderboard are publicly available at http://noisylabels.com.
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How Does Heterogeneous Label Noise Impact Generalization in Neural Nets?
Incorrectly labeled examples, or label noise, is common in real-world computer vision datasets. While the impact of label noise on learning in deep neural networks has been studied in prior work, these studies have exclusively focused on homogeneous label noise, i.e., the degree of label noise is the same across all categories. However, in the real-world, label noise is often heterogeneous, with some categories being affected to a greater extent than others. Here, we address this gap in the literature. We hypothesized that heterogeneous label noise would only affect the classes that had label noise unless there was transfer from those classes to the classes without label noise. To test this hypothesis, we designed a series of computer vision studies using MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and MS-COCO where we imposed heterogeneous label noise during the training of multi-class, multi-task, and multi-label systems. Our results provide evidence in support of our hypothesis: label noise only affects the class affected by it unless there is transfer.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1909696
- PAR ID:
- 10350734
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Symposium on Advances in Visual Computing
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)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 down-weighting 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. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/UCSC-REAL/CAL.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90436-4_18
