Making Deep Neural Networks Robust to Label Noise: a Loss Correction Approach

We present a theoretically grounded approach to train deep neural networks, including recurrent networks, subject to class-dependent label noise. We propose two procedures for loss correction that are agnostic to both application domain and network architecture. They simply amount to at most a matrix inversion and multiplication, provided that we know the probability of each class being corrupted into another. We further show how one can estimate these probabilities, adapting a recent technique for noise estimation to the multi-class setting, and thus providing an end-to-end framework. Extensive experiments on MNIST, IMDB, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and a large scale dataset of clothing images employing a diversity of architectures --- stacking dense, convolutional, pooling, dropout, batch normalization, word embedding, LSTM and residual layers --- demonstrate the noise robustness of our proposals. Incidentally, we also prove that, when ReLU is the only non-linearity, the loss curvature is immune to class-dependent label noise.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Result Benchmark
Learning with noisy labels CIFAR-100N Backward-T Accuracy (mean) 57.14 # 16
Learning with noisy labels CIFAR-100N Forward-T Accuracy (mean) 57.01 # 18
Learning with noisy labels CIFAR-10N-Aggregate Forward-T Accuracy (mean) 88.24 # 22
Learning with noisy labels CIFAR-10N-Aggregate Backward-T Accuracy (mean) 88.13 # 23
Learning with noisy labels CIFAR-10N-Random1 Backward-T Accuracy (mean) 87.14 # 22
Learning with noisy labels CIFAR-10N-Random1 Forward-T Accuracy (mean) 86.88 # 23
Learning with noisy labels CIFAR-10N-Random2 Forward-T Accuracy (mean) 86.14 # 22
Learning with noisy labels CIFAR-10N-Random2 Backward-T Accuracy (mean) 86.28 # 21
Learning with noisy labels CIFAR-10N-Random3 Backward-T Accuracy (mean) 86.86 # 21
Learning with noisy labels CIFAR-10N-Random3 Forward-T Accuracy (mean) 87.04 # 20
Learning with noisy labels CIFAR-10N-Worst Backward-T Accuracy (mean) 77.61 # 24
Learning with noisy labels CIFAR-10N-Worst Forward-T Accuracy (mean) 79.79 # 22
Image Classification Clothing1M (using clean data) Forward Accuracy 80.27 # 2

Results from Other Papers


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Source Paper Compare
Image Classification mini WebVision 1.0 F-Correction (Inception-ResNet-v2) Top-1 Accuracy 61.12 # 40
Top-5 Accuracy 82.68 # 31
ImageNet Top-1 Accuracy 57.36 # 36
ImageNet Top-5 Accuracy 82.36 # 31

Methods