DISC: Learning from Noisy Labels via Dynamic Instance-Specific Selection and Correction

Abstract

Existing studies indicate that deep neural networks (DNNs) can eventually memorize the label noise. We observe that the memorization strength of DNNs towards each instance is different and can be represented by the confidence value, which becomes larger and larger during the training process. Based on this, we propose a Dynamic Instance-specific Selection and Correction method (DISC) for learning from noisy labels (LNL). We first use a two- view-based backbone for image classification, obtaining confidence for each image from two views. Then we propose a dynamic threshold strategy for each instance, based on the momentum of each instance's memorization strength in previous epochs to select and correct noisy labeled data. Benefiting from the dynamic threshold strategy and two-view learning, we can effectively group each instance into one of the three subsets (i.e., clean, hard, and purified) based on the prediction consistency and discrepancy by two views at each epoch. Finally, we employ different regularization strategies to conquer subsets with different degrees of label noise, improving the whole network's robustness. Comprehensive evaluations on three controllable and four real-world LNL benchmarks show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods to leverage useful information in noisy data while alleviating the pollution of label noise. Code is available at https://github.com/JackYFL/DISC.