The Devil is in the Labels: Noisy Label Correction for Robust Scene Graph Generation

TL;DR

This paper introduces NICE, a model-agnostic strategy to detect and correct noisy labels in scene graph generation datasets, improving data quality and model robustness.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel, generalizable method for identifying and correcting noisy labels in SGG datasets, addressing a key data quality issue overlooked by prior work.

Findings

NICE effectively detects noisy samples in SGG datasets.

NICE improves the quality of predicate labels for better model training.

Extensive experiments show NICE's robustness across different models.

Abstract

Unbiased SGG has achieved significant progress over recent years. However, almost all existing SGG models have overlooked the ground-truth annotation qualities of prevailing SGG datasets, i.e., they always assume: 1) all the manually annotated positive samples are equally correct; 2) all the un-annotated negative samples are absolutely background. In this paper, we argue that both assumptions are inapplicable to SGG: there are numerous "noisy" groundtruth predicate labels that break these two assumptions, and these noisy samples actually harm the training of unbiased SGG models. To this end, we propose a novel model-agnostic NoIsy label CorrEction strategy for SGG: NICE. NICE can not only detect noisy samples but also reassign more high-quality predicate labels to them. After the NICE training, we can obtain a cleaner version of SGG dataset for model training. Specifically, NICE consists of three components: negative Noisy Sample Detection (Neg-NSD), positive NSD (Pos-NSD), and Noisy Sample Correction (NSC). Firstly, in Neg-NSD, we formulate this task as an out-of-distribution detection problem, and assign pseudo labels to all detected noisy negative samples. Then, in Pos-NSD, we use a clustering-based algorithm to divide all positive samples into multiple sets, and treat the samples in the noisiest set as noisy positive samples. Lastly, in NSC, we use a simple but effective weighted KNN to reassign new predicate labels to noisy positive samples. Extensive results on different backbones and tasks have attested to the effectiveness and generalization abilities of each component of NICE.