Instance-Dependent Noisy-Label Learning with Graphical Model Based Noise-Rate Estimation

Deep learning faces a formidable challenge when handling noisy labels, as models tend to overfit samples affected by label noise. This challenge is further compounded by the presence of instance-dependent noise (IDN), a realistic form of label noise arising from ambiguous sample information. To address IDN, Label Noise Learning (LNL) incorporates a sample selection stage to differentiate clean and noisy-label samples. This stage uses an arbitrary criterion and a pre-defined curriculum that initially selects most samples as noisy and gradually decreases this selection rate during training. Such curriculum is sub-optimal since it does not consider the actual label noise rate in the training set. This paper addresses this issue with a new noise-rate estimation method that is easily integrated with most state-of-the-art (SOTA) LNL methods to produce a more effective curriculum. Synthetic and real-world benchmarks’ results demonstrate that integrating our approach with SOTA LNL methods improves accuracy in most cases. (Code is available at https://github.com/arpit2412/NoiseRateLearning. Supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through grant EP/Y018036/1 and the Australian Research Council (ARC) through grant FT190100525.)