DIOR: Learning to Hash With Label Noise Via Dual Partition and Contrastive Learning

Due to the excellent computing efficiency, learning to hash has acquired broad popularity for Big Data retrieval. Although supervised hashing methods have achieved promising performance recently, they presume that all training samples are appropriately annotated. Unfortunately, label noise is ubiquitous owing to erroneous annotations in real-world applications, which could seriously deteriorate the retrieval performance due to imprecise supervised guidance and severe memorization of noisy data. Here we propose a comprehensive method DIOR to handle the difficulties of learning to hash with label noise. DIOR performs partitions from two complementary levels, namely sample level and parameter level. On the one hand, DIOR divides the dataset into a labeled set with clean samples and an unlabeled set with noisy samples using an ensemble of perturbed views. Then we train the network in a contrastive semi-supervised manner by reconstructing label embeddings for both reliable supervision of clean data and sufficient exploration of noisy data. On the other hand, inspired by recent pruning techniques, DIOR divides the parameters in the hashing network into crucial parameters and non-crucial parameters, and then optimizes them separately to reduce the overfitting of noisy data. Extensive experiments on four popular benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DIOR.