Hao Cheng

Zhaowei Zhu, Jialu Wang, Hao Cheng et al.

Language models have shown promise in various tasks but can be affected by undesired data during training, fine-tuning, or alignment. For example, if some unsafe conversations are wrongly annotated as safe ones, the model fine-tuned on these samples may be harmful. Therefore, the correctness of annotations, i.e., the credibility of the dataset, is important. This study focuses on the credibility of real-world datasets, including the popular benchmarks Jigsaw Civil Comments, Anthropic Harmless & Red Team, PKU BeaverTails & SafeRLHF, that can be used for training a harmless language model. Given the cost and difficulty of cleaning these datasets by humans, we introduce a systematic framework for evaluating the credibility of datasets, identifying label errors, and evaluating the influence of noisy labels in the curated language data, specifically focusing on unsafe comments and conversation classification. With the framework, we find and fix an average of 6.16% label errors in 11 datasets constructed from the above benchmarks. The data credibility and downstream learning performance can be remarkably improved by directly fixing label errors, indicating the significance of cleaning existing real-world datasets. We provide an open-source tool, Docta, for data cleaning at https://github.com/Docta-ai/docta.

Chengyu Dong, Liyuan Liu, Hao Cheng et al. · microsoft-research

ELECTRA pre-trains language models by detecting tokens in a sequence that have been replaced by an auxiliary model. Although ELECTRA offers a significant boost in efficiency, its potential is constrained by the training cost brought by the auxiliary model. Notably, this model, which is jointly trained with the main model, only serves to assist the training of the main model and is discarded post-training. This results in a substantial amount of training cost being expended in vain. To mitigate this issue, we propose Fast-ELECTRA, which leverages an existing language model as the auxiliary model. To construct a learning curriculum for the main model, we smooth its output distribution via temperature scaling following a descending schedule. Our approach rivals the performance of state-of-the-art ELECTRA-style pre-training methods, while significantly eliminating the computation and memory cost brought by the joint training of the auxiliary model. Our method also reduces the sensitivity to hyper-parameters and enhances the pre-training stability.

Mingcai Chen, Yuntao Du, Wei Tang et al.

In real-world applications, perfect labels are rarely available, making it challenging to develop robust machine learning algorithms that can handle noisy labels. Recent methods have focused on filtering noise based on the discrepancy between model predictions and given noisy labels, assuming that samples with small classification losses are clean. This work takes a different approach by leveraging the consistency between the learned model and the entire noisy dataset using the rich representational and topological information in the data. We introduce LaplaceConfidence, a method that to obtain label confidence (i.e., clean probabilities) utilizing the Laplacian energy. Specifically, it first constructs graphs based on the feature representations of all noisy samples and minimizes the Laplacian energy to produce a low-energy graph. Clean labels should fit well into the low-energy graph while noisy ones should not, allowing our method to determine data's clean probabilities. Furthermore, LaplaceConfidence is embedded into a holistic method for robust training, where co-training technique generates unbiased label confidence and label refurbishment technique better utilizes it. We also explore the dimensionality reduction technique to accommodate our method on large-scale noisy datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that LaplaceConfidence outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets under both synthetic and real-world noise.

Yuting Gao, Jia-Xin Zhuang, Shaohui Lin et al.

While self-supervised representation learning (SSL) has received widespread attention from the community, recent research argue that its performance will suffer a cliff fall when the model size decreases. The current method mainly relies on contrastive learning to train the network and in this work, we propose a simple yet effective Distilled Contrastive Learning (DisCo) to ease the issue by a large margin. Specifically, we find the final embedding obtained by the mainstream SSL methods contains the most fruitful information, and propose to distill the final embedding to maximally transmit a teacher's knowledge to a lightweight model by constraining the last embedding of the student to be consistent with that of the teacher. In addition, in the experiment, we find that there exists a phenomenon termed Distilling BottleNeck and present to enlarge the embedding dimension to alleviate this problem. Our method does not introduce any extra parameter to lightweight models during deployment. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art on all lightweight models. Particularly, when ResNet-101/ResNet-50 is used as teacher to teach EfficientNet-B0, the linear result of EfficientNet-B0 on ImageNet is very close to ResNet-101/ResNet-50, but the number of parameters of EfficientNet-B0 is only 9.4\%/16.3\% of ResNet-101/ResNet-50. Code is available at https://github. com/Yuting-Gao/DisCo-pytorch.

Hao Cheng, Zhaowei Zhu, Xingyu Li et al.

Human-annotated labels are often prone to noise, and the presence of such noise will degrade the performance of the resulting deep neural network (DNN) models. Much of the literature (with several recent exceptions) of learning with noisy labels focuses on the case when the label noise is independent of features. Practically, annotations errors tend to be instance-dependent and often depend on the difficulty levels of recognizing a certain task. Applying existing results from instance-independent settings would require a significant amount of estimation of noise rates. Therefore, providing theoretically rigorous solutions for learning with instance-dependent label noise remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose CORES$^{2}$ (COnfidence REgularized Sample Sieve), which progressively sieves out corrupted examples. The implementation of CORES$^{2}$ does not require specifying noise rates and yet we are able to provide theoretical guarantees of CORES$^{2}$ in filtering out the corrupted examples. This high-quality sample sieve allows us to treat clean examples and the corrupted ones separately in training a DNN solution, and such a separation is shown to be advantageous in the instance-dependent noise setting. We demonstrate the performance of CORES$^{2}$ on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets with synthetic instance-dependent label noise and Clothing1M with real-world human noise. As of independent interests, our sample sieve provides a generic machinery for anatomizing noisy datasets and provides a flexible interface for various robust training techniques to further improve the performance. Code is available at https://github.com/UCSC-REAL/cores.

Yaxuan Wang, Hao Cheng, Jing Xiong et al.

Detecting anomalies in temporal data has gained significant attention across various real-world applications, aiming to identify unusual events and mitigate potential hazards. In practice, situations often involve a mix of segment-level labels (detected abnormal events with segments of time points) and unlabeled data (undetected events), while the ideal algorithmic outcome should be point-level predictions. Therefore, the huge label information gap between training data and targets makes the task challenging. In this study, we formulate the above imperfect information as noisy labels and propose NRdetector, a noise-resilient framework that incorporates confidence-based sample selection, robust segment-level learning, and data-centric point-level detection for multivariate time series anomaly detection. Particularly, to bridge the information gap between noisy segment-level labels and missing point-level labels, we develop a novel loss function that can effectively mitigate the label noise and consider the temporal features. It encourages the smoothness of consecutive points and the separability of points from segments with different labels. Extensive experiments on real-world multivariate time series datasets with 11 different evaluation metrics demonstrate that NRdetector consistently achieves robust results across multiple real-world datasets, outperforming various baselines adapted to operate in our setting.

Jiaheng Wei, Zhaowei Zhu, Hao Cheng et al.

Existing research on learning with noisy labels mainly focuses on synthetic label noise. Synthetic noise, though has clean structures which greatly enabled statistical analyses, often fails to model real-world noise patterns. The recent literature has observed several efforts to offer real-world noisy datasets, yet the existing efforts suffer from two caveats: (1) The lack of ground-truth verification makes it hard to theoretically study the property and treatment of real-world label noise; (2) 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 crucial to build controllable and moderate-sized real-world noisy datasets with both ground-truth and noisy labels. This work presents two new benchmark datasets CIFAR-10N, CIFAR-100N, equipping the training datasets of CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 with human-annotated real-world noisy labels we collected 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 benchmarking 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. Datasets and leaderboards are available at http://noisylabels.com.

Huixiang Luo, Hao Cheng, Fanxu Meng et al.

Pseudo-labeling (PL) and Data Augmentation-based Consistency Training (DACT) are two approaches widely used in Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods. These methods exhibit great power in many machine learning tasks by utilizing unlabeled data for efficient training. But in a more realistic setting (termed as open-set SSL), where unlabeled dataset contains out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, the traditional SSL methods suffer severe performance degradation. Recent approaches mitigate the negative influence of OOD samples by filtering them out from the unlabeled data. However, it is not clear whether directly removing the OOD samples is the best choice. Furthermore, why PL and DACT could perform differently in open-set SSL remains a mystery. In this paper, we thoroughly analyze various SSL methods (PL and DACT) on open-set SSL and discuss pros and cons of these two approaches separately. Based on our analysis, we propose Style Disturbance to improve traditional SSL methods on open-set SSL and experimentally show our approach can achieve state-of-the-art results on various datasets by utilizing OOD samples properly. We believe our study can bring new insights for SSL research.

Hao Cheng, Xiaoqing Yang, Zang Li et al.

Deep neural networks have been widely used in text classification. However, it is hard to interpret the neural models due to the complicate mechanisms. In this work, we study the interpretability of a variant of the typical text classification model which is based on convolutional operation and max-pooling layer. Two mechanisms: convolution attribution and n-gram feature analysis are proposed to analyse the process procedure for the CNN model. The interpretability of the model is reflected by providing posterior interpretation for neural network predictions. Besides, a multi-sentence strategy is proposed to enable the model to beused in multi-sentence situation without loss of performance and interpret ability. We evaluate the performance of the model on several classification tasks and justify the interpretable performance with some case studies.