Class-Wise Denoising for Robust Learning under Label Noise

Label noise is ubiquitous in many real-world scenarios which often misleads training algorithm and brings about the degraded classification performance. Therefore, many approaches have been proposed to correct the loss function given corrupted labels to combat such label noise. Among them, a trend of works unbiasedly estimate the data centroid, which plays an important role in constructing an unbiased risk estimator. However, they usually handle the noisy labels in different classes all at once, so the local information inherited by each class is ignored. To address this defect, this paper presents a novel robust learning algorithm dubbed “Class-Wise Denoising” (CWD), which tackles the noisy labels in a class-wise way to ease the entire noise correction task. Specifically, two virtual auxiliary sets are respectively constructed by presuming that the positive and negative labels in the training set are clean, so the original false-negative labels and false-positive ones are tackled separately. As a result, an improved centroid estimator can be designed which helps to yield more accurate risk estimator. Our CWD can produce the improved classification performance under label noise, which is also demonstrated by the comparisons with ten representative state-of-the-art methods on a variety of benchmark datasets.