FGCM: Noisy Label Learning via Fine-Grained Confidence Modeling

Abstract

A small portion of mislabeled data can easily limit the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) due to their high capacity for memorizing random labels. Thus, robust learning from noisy labels has become a key challenge for deep learning due to inadequate datasets with high-quality annotations. Most existing methods involve training models on clean sets by dividing clean samples from noisy ones, resulting in large amounts of mislabeled data being unused. To address this problem, we propose categorizing training samples into five fine-grained clusters based on the difficulty experienced by DNN models when learning them and label correctness. A novel fine-grained confidence modeling (FGCM) framework is proposed to cluster samples into these five categories; with each cluster, FGCM decides whether to accept the cluster data as they are, accept them with label correction, or accept them as unlabeled data. By applying different strategies to the fine-grained clusters, FGCM can better exploit training data than previous methods. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, clothing1M, and WebVision with different ratios and types of label noise demonstrate the superiority of our FGCM.

Keywords

• noisy labeled data
• robust learning
• image classification