LNL+K: Enhancing Learning with Noisy Labels Through Noise Source Knowledge Integration
This addresses the issue of noisy datasets for machine learning practitioners, offering a novel approach that is effective even when noise is prevalent, though it builds incrementally on existing LNL methods.
The paper tackles the problem of learning with noisy labels by integrating knowledge about likely noise sources, which boosts performance in challenging settings where traditional methods fail, achieving gains of up to 23% on diverse datasets.
Learning with noisy labels (LNL) aims to train a high-performing model using a noisy dataset. We observe that noise for a given class often comes from a limited set of categories, yet many LNL methods overlook this. For example, an image mislabeled as a cheetah is more likely a leopard than a hippopotamus due to its visual similarity. Thus, we explore Learning with Noisy Labels with noise source Knowledge integration (LNL+K), which leverages knowledge about likely source(s) of label noise that is often provided in a dataset's meta-data. Integrating noise source knowledge boosts performance even in settings where LNL methods typically fail. For example, LNL+K methods are effective on datasets where noise represents the majority of samples, which breaks a critical premise of most methods developed for LNL. Our LNL+K methods can boost performance even when noise sources are estimated rather than extracted from meta-data. We provide several baseline LNL+K methods that integrate noise source knowledge into state-of-the-art LNL models that are evaluated across six diverse datasets and two types of noise, where we report gains of up to 23% compared to the unadapted methods. Critically, we show that LNL methods fail to generalize on some real-world datasets, even when adapted to integrate noise source knowledge, highlighting the importance of directly exploring LNL+K.