A bi-level formulation for label noise learning with spectral cluster discovery

Practically, we often face the dilemma that some of the examples for training a classifier are incorrectly labeled due to various subjective and objective factors. Although intensive efforts have been put to design classifiers that are robust to label noise, most of the previous methods have not fully utilized data distribution information. To address this issue, this paper introduces a bi-level learning paradigm termed “Spectral Cluster Discovery” (SCD) for combating with noisy labels. Namely, we simultaneously learn a robust classifier (Learning stage) by discovering the low-rank approximation to the ground-truth label matrix and learn an ideal affinity graph (Clustering stage). Specifically, we use the learned classifier to assign the examples with similar label to a mutual cluster. Based on the cluster membership, we use the learned affinity graph to explore the noisy examples based on the cluster membership. Both stages will reinforce each other iteratively. Experimental results on typical benchmark and real-world datasets verify the superiority of SCD to other label noise learning methods.