Using Trusted Data to Train Deep Networks on Labels Corrupted by Severe Noise

TL;DR

This paper introduces a loss correction method that leverages a small trusted dataset to improve deep neural network robustness against severe label noise in vision and NLP tasks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel loss correction technique that uses trusted data to effectively mitigate the impact of severe label noise, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

Significant performance improvements over existing methods

Effective across vision and NLP tasks

Robust against various levels of label noise

Abstract

The growing importance of massive datasets used for deep learning makes robustness to label noise a critical property for classifiers to have. Sources of label noise include automatic labeling, non-expert labeling, and label corruption by data poisoning adversaries. Numerous previous works assume that no source of labels can be trusted. We relax this assumption and assume that a small subset of the training data is trusted. This enables substantial label corruption robustness performance gains. In addition, particularly severe label noise can be combated by using a set of trusted data with clean labels. We utilize trusted data by proposing a loss correction technique that utilizes trusted examples in a data-efficient manner to mitigate the effects of label noise on deep neural network classifiers. Across vision and natural language processing tasks, we experiment with various label noises at several strengths, and show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods.