PNP: Robust Learning from Noisy Labels by Probabilistic Noise Prediction

Abstract

Label noise has been a practical challenge in deep learning due to the strong capability of deep neural networks in fitting all training data. Prior literature primarily resorts to sample selection methods for combating noisy labels. However, these approaches focus on dividing samples by order sorting or threshold selection, inevitably introducing hyperparameters (e.g., selection ratio / threshold) that are hard-to-tune and dataset-dependent. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective approach named PNP (Probabilistic Noise Prediction) to explicitly model label noise. Specifically, we simultaneously train two networks, in which one predicts the category label and the other predicts the noise type. By predicting label noise probabilistically, we identify noisy samples and adopt dedicated optimization objectives accordingly. Finally, we establish a joint loss for network update by unifying the classification loss, the auxiliary constraint loss, and the in-distribution consistency loss. Comprehensive experimental results on synthetic and realworld datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method. The source code and models have been made available at https://github.com/NUST-Machine-Intelligence-Laboratory/PNP.