RankMatch: Fostering Confidence and Consistency in Learning with Noisy Labels

Abstract

Learning with noisy labels (LNL) is one of the most important and challenging problems in weakly-supervised learning. Recent advances adopt the sample selection strategy to mitigate the interference of noisy labels and use small-loss criteria to select clean samples. However, the one-dimensional loss is an over-simplified metric that fails to accommodate the complex feature landscape of various samples, and, hence, is prone to introduce classification errors during sample selection. In this paper, we propose RankMatch, a novel LNL framework that investigates additional dimensions of confidence and consistency in order to combat noisy labels. Confidence-wise, we propose a novel sample selection strategy based on confidence representation voting instead of the widely-used small-loss criterion. This new strategy is capable of increasing sample selection quantity without sacrificing labeling accuracy. Consistency-wise, instead of the widely adopted feature distance metric for measuring the consistency of inner-class samples, we advocate that the rank of principal features is a much more robust indicator. Based on this metric, we propose rank contrastive loss, which strengthens the consistency of similar samples regardless of their labels and facilitates feature representation learning. Experimental results on noisy versions of CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Clothing1M and WebVision have validated the superiority of our approach over existing state-of-the-art methods.