Class-Dependent Label-Noise Learning with Cycle-Consistency Regularization

In label-noise learning, estimating the transition matrix plays an important role in building statistically consistent classifier. Current state-of-the-art consistent estimator for the transition matrix has been developed under the newly proposed sufficiently scattered assumption, through incorporating the minimum volume constraint of the transition matrix T into label-noise learning. To compute the volume of T, it heavily relies on the estimated noisy class posterior. However, the estimation error of the noisy class posterior could usually be large as deep learning methods tend to easily overfit the noisy labels. Then, directly minimizing the volume of such obtained T could lead the transition matrix to be poorly estimated. How to reduce the side-effects of the inaccurate noisy class posterior remains unsolved. In this paper, we creatively propose to estimate the transition matrix under a forward-backward cycle-consistency regularization, of which we have greatly reduced the dependency of estimating the transition matrix T on the noisy class posterior. Extensive experimental results consistently justify the effectiveness of the proposed method, on reducing the estimation error of the transition matrix and greatly boosting the classification performance.