Learning from web data has attracted lots of research interest in recent years. However, crawled web images usually have two types of noises, label noise and background noise, which induce extra difficulties in utilizing them effectively. Most existing methods either rely on human supervision or ignore the background noise. In this paper, we propose a novel method, which is capable of handling these two types of noises together, without the supervision of clean images in the training stage. Particularly, we formulate our method under the framework of multi-instance learning by grouping ROIs (i.e., images and their region proposals) from the same category into bags. ROIs in each bag are assigned with different weights based on the representative discriminative scores of their nearest clusters, in which the clusters and their scores are obtained via our designed memory module. Our memory module could be naturally integrated with the classification module, leading to an end-to-end trainable system. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
In learning classifier with web data, previous works focus on handling the label noise in three directions, removing label noise @cite_14 @cite_48 @cite_32 @cite_57 @cite_12 @cite_5 @cite_43 , building noise-robust model @cite_29 @cite_18 @cite_39 @cite_0 @cite_38 @cite_47 , and curriculum learning @cite_6 @cite_26 .
@cite_38 @cite_18 @cite_14 @cite_26 @cite_48 @cite_29 @cite_32 @cite_6 @cite_39 @cite_57 @cite_43 @cite_0 @cite_5 @cite_47 @cite_12
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The growing importance of massive datasets with the advent of deep learning makes robustness to label noise a critical property for classifiers to have. Sources of label noise include automatic labeling for large datasets, non-expert labeling, and label corruption by data poisoning adversaries. In the latter case, corruptions may be arbitrarily bad, even so bad that a classifier predicts the wrong labels with high confidence. To protect against such sources of noise, we leverage the fact that a small set of clean labels is often easy to procure. We demonstrate that robustness to label noise up to severe strengths can be achieved by using a set of trusted data with clean labels, and propose a loss correction 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. Traditional classification systems rely heavily on sufficient training data with accurate labels. However, the quality of the collected data depends on the labelers, among which inexperienced labelers may exist and produce unexpected labels that may degrade the performance of a learning system. In this paper, we investigate the multiclass classification problem where a certain amount of training examples are randomly labeled. Specifically, we show that this issue can be formulated as a label noise problem. To perform multiclass classification, we employ the widely used importance reweighting strategy to enable the learning on noisy data to more closely reflect the results on noise-free data. We illustrate the applicability of this strategy to any surrogate loss functions and to different classification settings. The proportion of randomly labeled examples is proved to be upper bounded and can be estimated under a mild condition. The convergence analysis ensures the consistency of the learned classifier to the optimal classifier with respect to clean data. Two instantiations of the proposed strategy are also introduced. Experiments on synthetic and real data verify that our approach yields improvements over the traditional classifiers as well as the robust classifiers. Moreover, we empirically demonstrate that the proposed strategy is effective even on asymmetrically noisy data. In this paper, we study the problem of learning image classification models with label noise. Existing approaches depending on human supervision are generally not scalable as manually identifying correct or incorrect labels is time-consuming, whereas approaches not relying on human supervision are scalable but less effective. To reduce the amount of human supervision for label noise cleaning, we introduce CleanNet, a joint neural embedding network, which only requires a fraction of the classes being manually verified to provide the knowledge of label noise that can be transferred to other classes. We further integrate CleanNet and conventional convolutional neural network classifier into one framework for image classification learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on both of the label noise detection task and the image classification on noisy data task on several large-scale datasets. Experimental results show that CleanNet can reduce label noise detection error rate on held-out classes where no human supervision available by 41.5 compared to current weakly supervised methods. It also achieves 47 of the performance gain of verifying all images with only 3.2 images verified on an image classification task. Source code and dataset will be available at kuanghuei.github.io CleanNetProject. In this paper, we study the problem of learning in the presence of classification noise in the probabilistic learning model of Valiant and its variants. In order to identify the class of “robust” learning algorithms in the most general way, we formalize a new but related model of learning from statistical queries . Intuitively, in this model a learning algorithm is forbidden to examine individual examples of the unknown target function, but is given acess to an oracle providing estimates of probabilities over the sample space of random examples. One of our main results shows that any class of functions learnable from statistical queries is in fact learnable with classification noise in Valiant's model, with a noise rate approaching the information-theoretic barrier of 1 2. We then demonstrate the generality of the statistical query model, showing that practically every class learnable in Valiant's model and its variants can also be learned in the new model (and thus can be learned in the presence of noise). A notable exception to this statement is the class of parity functions, which we prove is not learnable from statistical queries, and for which no noise-tolerant algorithm is known. Understanding the simultaneously very diverse and intricately fine-grained set of possible human actions is a critical open problem in computer vision. Manually labeling training videos is feasible for some action classes but doesnt scale to the full long-tailed distribution of actions. A promising way to address this is to leverage noisy data from web queries to learn new actions, using semi-supervised or webly-supervised approaches. However, these methods typically do not learn domain-specific knowledge, or rely on iterative hand-tuned data labeling policies. In this work, we instead propose a reinforcement learning-based formulation for selecting the right examples for training a classifier from noisy web search results. Our method uses Q-learning to learn a data labeling policy on a small labeled training dataset, and then uses this to automatically label noisy web data for new visual concepts. Experiments on the challenging Sports-1M action recognition benchmark as well as on additional fine-grained and newly emerging action classes demonstrate that our method is able to learn good labeling policies for noisy data and use this to learn accurate visual concept classifiers. Data mining and knowledge discovery aim at producing useful and reliable models from the data. Unfortunately some databases contain noisy data which perturb the generalization of the models. An important source of noise consists of mislabelled training instances. We offer a new approach which deals with improving classification accuracies by using a preliminary filtering procedure. An example is suspect when in its neighbourhood defined by a geometrical graph the proportion of examples of the same class is not significantly greater than in the database itself. Such suspect examples in the training data can be removed or relabelled. The filtered training set is then provided as input to learning algorithms. Our experiments on ten benchmarks of UCI Machine Learning Repository using 1-NN as the final algorithm show that removal gives better results than relabelling. Removing allows maintaining the generalization error rate when we introduce from 0 to 20 of noise on the class, especially when classes are well separable. The filtering method proposed is finally compared to the relaxation relabelling schema. Abstract Studies show that refining real-world categories into semantic subcategories contributes to better image modeling and classification. Previous image sub-categorization work relying on labeled images and WordNet’s hierarchy is labor-intensive. To tackle this problem, in this work, we extract textual and visual features to automatically select and subsequently classify web images into semantic rich categories. The following two major challenges are well studied: (1) noise in the labels of subcategories derived from the general corpus; (2) noise in the labels of images retrieved from the web. Specifically, we first obtain the semantic refinement subcategories from the text perspective and remove the noise by using the relevance-based approach. To suppress the search error induced noisy images, we then formulate image selection and classifier learning as a multi-instance learning problem and propose to solve the employed problem by the cutting-plane algorithm. The experiments show significant performance gains by using the generated data of our approach on image categorization tasks. The proposed approach also consistently outperforms existing weakly supervised and web-supervised approaches. Large-scale datasets possessing clean label annotations are crucial for training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, labeling large-scale data can be very costly and error-prone, and even high-quality datasets are likely to contain noisy (incorrect) labels. Existing works usually employ a closed-set assumption, whereby the samples associated with noisy labels possess a true class contained within the set of known classes in the training data. However, such an assumption is too restrictive for many applications, since samples associated with noisy labels might in fact possess a true class that is not present in the training data. We refer to this more complex scenario as the open-set noisy label problem and show that it is nontrivial in order to make accurate predictions. To address this problem, we propose a novel iterative learning framework for training CNNs on datasets with open-set noisy labels. Our approach detects noisy labels and learns deep discriminative features in an iterative fashion. To benefit from the noisy label detection, we design a Siamese network to encourage clean labels and noisy labels to be dissimilar. A reweighting module is also applied to simultaneously emphasize the learning from clean labels and reduce the effect caused by noisy labels. Experiments on CIFAR-10, ImageNet and real-world noisy (web-search) datasets demonstrate that our proposed model can robustly train CNNs in the presence of a high proportion of open-set as well as closed-set noisy labels. After a classifier is trained using a machine learning algorithm and put to use in a real world system, it often faces noise which did not appear in the training data. Particularly, some subset of features may be missing or may become corrupted. We present two novel machine learning techniques that are robust to this type of classification-time noise. First, we solve an approximation to the learning problem using linear programming. We analyze the tightness of our approximation and prove statistical risk bounds for this approach. Second, we define the online-learning variant of our problem, address this variant using a modified Perceptron, and obtain a statistical learning algorithm using an online-to-batch technique. We conclude with a set of experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms. In supervised learning, a training set consisting of labeled instances is used by a learning algorithm for generating a model (classifier) that is subsequently employed for deciding the class label of new instances (for generalization). Characteristics of the training set, such as presence of noisy instances and size, influence the learning algorithm and affect generalization performance. This paper introduces a new network-based representation of a training set, called hit miss network (HMN), which provides a compact description of the nearest neighbor relation over pairs of instances from each pair of classes. We show that structural properties of HMN's correspond to properties of training points related to the one nearest neighbor (1-NN) decision rule, such as being border or central point. This motivates us to use HMN's for improving the performance of a 1-NN, classifier by removing instances from the training set (instance selection). We introduce three new HMN-based algorithms for instance selection. HMN-C, which removes instances without affecting accuracy of 1-NN on the original training set, HMN-E, based on a more aggressive storage reduction, and HMN-EI, which applies iteratively HMN-E. Their performance is assessed on 22 data sets with different characteristics, such as input dimension, cardinality, class balance, number of classes, noise content, and presence of redundant variables. Results of experiments on these data sets show that accuracy of 1-NN classifier increases significantly when HMN-EI is applied. Comparison with state-of-the-art editing algorithms for instance selection on these data sets indicates best generalization performance of HMN-EI and no significant difference in storage requirements. In general, these results indicate that HMN's provide a powerful graph-based representation of a training set, which can be successfully applied for performing noise and redundance reduction in instance-based learning. In this paper, we explore noise-tolerant learning of classifiers. We formulate the problem as follows. We assume that there is an unobservable training set that is noise free. The actual training set given to the learning algorithm is obtained from this ideal data set by corrupting the class label of each example. The probability that the class label of an example is corrupted is a function of the feature vector of the example. This would account for most kinds of noisy data one encounters in practice. We say that a learning method is noise tolerant if the classifiers learnt with noise-free data and with noisy data, both have the same classification accuracy on the noise-free data. In this paper, we analyze the noise-tolerance properties of risk minimization (under different loss functions). We show that risk minimization under 0-1 loss function has impressive noise-tolerance properties and that under squared error loss is tolerant only to uniform noise; risk minimization under other loss functions is not noise tolerant. We conclude this paper with some discussion on the implications of these theoretical results. In this article, we exploit the problem of annotating a large-scale image corpus by label propagation over noisily tagged web images. To annotate the images more accurately, we propose a novel kNN-sparse graph-based semi-supervised learning approach for harnessing the labeled and unlabeled data simultaneously. The sparse graph constructed by datum-wise one-vs-kNN sparse reconstructions of all samples can remove most of the semantically unrelated links among the data, and thus it is more robust and discriminative than the conventional graphs. Meanwhile, we apply the approximate k nearest neighbors to accelerate the sparse graph construction without loosing its effectiveness. More importantly, we propose an effective training label refinement strategy within this graph-based learning framework to handle the noise in the training labels, by bringing in a dual regularization for both the quantity and sparsity of the noise. We conduct extensive experiments on a real-world image database consisting of 55,615 Flickr images and noisily tagged training labels. The results demonstrate both the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach and its capability to deal with the noise in the training labels. We present a probabilistic approach to learning a Gaussian Process classifier in the presence of unlabeled data. Our approach involves a "null category noise model" (NCNM) inspired by ordered categorical noise models. The noise model reflects an assumption that the data density is lower between the class-conditional densities. We illustrate our approach on a toy problem and present comparative results for the semi-supervised classification of handwritten digits. We present a theoretically grounded approach to train deep neural networks, including recurrent networks, subject to class-dependent label noise. We propose two procedures for loss correction that are agnostic to both application domain and network architecture. They simply amount to at most a matrix inversion and multiplication, provided that we know the probability of each class being corrupted into another. We further show how one can estimate these probabilities, adapting a recent technique for noise estimation to the multi-class setting, and thus providing an end-to-end framework. Extensive experiments on MNIST, IMDB, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and a large scale dataset of clothing images employing a diversity of architectures &#x2014; stacking dense, convolutional, pooling, dropout, batch normalization, word embedding, LSTM and residual layers &#x2014; demonstrate the noise robustness of our proposals. Incidentally, we also prove that, when ReLU is the only non-linearity, the loss curvature is immune to class-dependent label noise. In this work, we formulate a new weakly supervised domain generalization approach for visual recognition by using loosely labeled web images videos as training data. Specifically, we aim to address two challenging issues when learning robust classifiers: 1) coping with noise in the labels of training web images videos in the source domain; and 2) enhancing generalization capability of learnt classifiers to any unseen target domain. To address the first issue, we partition the training samples in each class into multiple clusters. By treating each cluster as a “bag” and the samples in each cluster as “instances”, we formulate a multi-instance learning (MIL) problem by selecting a subset of training samples from each training bag and simultaneously learning the optimal classifiers based on the selected samples. To address the second issue, we assume the training web images videos may come from multiple hidden domains with different data distributions. We then extend our MIL formulation to learn one classifier for each class and each latent domain such that multiple classifiers from each class can be effectively integrated to achieve better generalization capability. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our new approach for visual recognition by learning from web data. The ability of learning from noisy labels is very useful in many visual recognition tasks, as a vast amount of data with noisy labels are relatively easy to obtain. Traditionally, label noise has been treated as statistical outliers, and techniques such as importance re-weighting and bootstrapping have been proposed to alleviate the problem. According to our observation, the real-world noisy labels exhibit multimode characteristics as the true labels, rather than behaving like independent random outliers. In this work, we propose a unified distillation framework to use “side” information, including a small clean dataset and label relations in knowledge graph, to “hedge the risk” of learning from noisy labels. Unlike the traditional approaches evaluated based on simulated label noises, we propose a suite of new benchmark datasets, in Sports, Species and Artifacts domains, to evaluate the task of learning from noisy labels in the practical setting. The empirical study demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method in all the domains. We focus on learning open-vocabulary visual classifiers, which scale up to a large portion of natural language vocabulary (e.g., over tens of thousands of classes). In particular, the training data are large-scale weakly labeled Web images since it is difficult to acquire sufficient well-labeled data at this category scale. In this paper, we propose a novel online learning paradigm towards this challenging task. Different from traditional N-way independent classifiers that generally fail to handle the extremely sparse and inter-related labels, our classifiers learn from continuous label embeddings discovered by collaboratively decomposing the sparse image-label matrix. Leveraging on the structure of the proposed collaborative learning formulation, we develop an efficient online algorithm that can jointly learn the label embeddings and visual classifiers. The algorithm can learn over 30,000 classes of 1,000 training images within 1 second on a standard GPU. Extensively experimental results on four benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We study binary classification in the presence of class-conditional random noise, where the learner gets to see labels that are flipped independently with some probability, and where the flip probability depends on the class. Our goal is to devise learning algorithms that are efficient and statistically consistent with respect to commonly used utility measures. In particular, we look at a family of measures motivated by their application in domains where cost-sensitive learning is necessary (for example, when there is class imbalance). In contrast to most of the existing literature on consistent classification that are limited to the classical 0-1 loss, our analysis includes more general utility measures such as the AM measure (arithmetic mean of True Positive Rate and True Negative Rate). For this problem of cost-sensitive learning under class-conditional random noise, we develop two approaches that are based on suitably modifying surrogate losses. First, we provide a simple unbiased estimator of any loss, and obtain performance bounds for empirical utility maximization in the presence of i.i.d. data with noisy labels. If the loss function satis_es a simple symmetry condition, we show that using unbiased estimator leads to an efficient algorithm for empirical maximization. Second, by leveraging a reduction of risk minimization under noisy labels to classification with weighted 0-1 loss, we suggest the use of a simple weighted surrogate loss, for which we are able to obtain strong utility bounds. This approach implies that methods already used in practice, such as biased SVM and weighted logistic regression, are provably noise-tolerant. For two practically important measures in our family, we show that the proposed methods are competitive with respect to recently proposed methods for dealing with label noise in several benchmark data sets. Relevant and irrelevant images collected from the Web (e.g., Flickr.com) have been employed as loosely labeled training data for image categorization and retrieval. In this work, we propose a new approach to learn a robust classifier for text-based image retrieval (TBIR) using relevant and irrelevant training web images, in which we explicitly handle noise in the loose labels of training images. Specifically, we first partition the relevant and irrelevant training web images into clusters. By treating each cluster as a “bag” and the images in each bag as “instances”, we formulate this task as a multi-instance learning problem with constrained positive bags, in which each positive bag contains at least a portion of positive instances. We present a new algorithm called MIL-CPB to effectively exploit such constraints on positive bags and predict the labels of test instances (images). Observing that the constraints on positive bags may not always be satisfied in our application, we additionally propose a progressive scheme (referred to as Progressive MIL-CPB, or PMIL-CPB) to further improve the retrieval performance, in which we iteratively partition the top-ranked training web images from the current MIL-CPB classifier to construct more confident positive “bags” and then add these new “bags” as training data to learn the subsequent MIL-CPB classifiers. Comprehensive experiments on two challenging real-world web image data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We address the problem of partially-labeled multiclass classification, where instead of a single label per instance, the algorithm is given a candidate set of labels, only one of which is correct. Our setting is motivated by a common scenario in many image and video collections, where only partial access to labels is available. The goal is to learn a classifier that can disambiguate the partially-labeled training instances, and generalize to unseen data. We define an intuitive property of the data distribution that sharply characterizes the ability to learn in this setting and show that effective learning is possible even when all the data is only partially labeled. Exploiting this property of the data, we propose a convex learning formulation based on minimization of a loss function appropriate for the partial label setting. We analyze the conditions under which our loss function is asymptotically consistent, as well as its generalization and transductive performance. We apply our framework to identifying faces culled from web news sources and to naming characters in TV series and movies; in particular, we annotated and experimented on a very large video data set and achieve 6 error for character naming on 16 episodes of the TV series Lost.