Sample Selection Approach with Number of False Predictions for Learning with Noisy Labels

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have made a significant impact on a variety of research fields and applications. One drawback of DNNs is that it requires a huge amount of dataset for training. Since it is very expensive to ask experts to label the data, many non-expert data collection methods such as web crawling have been proposed. However, dataset created by non-experts often contain corrupted labels, and DNNs trained on such dataset are unreliable. Since DNNs have an enormous number of parameters, it tends to overfit to noisy labels, resulting in poor generalization performance. This problem is called Learning with Noisy labels (LNL). Recent studies showed that DNNs are robust to the noisy labels in the early stage of learning before over-fitting to noisy labels because DNNs learn the simple patterns first. Therefore DNNs tend to output true labels for samples with noisy labels in the early stage of learning, and the number of false predictions for samples with noisy labels is higher than for samples with clean labels. Based on these observations, we propose a new sample selection approach for LNL using the number of false predictions. Our method periodically collects the records of false predictions during training, and select samples with a low number of false predictions from the recent records. Then our method iteratively performs sample selection and training a DNNs model using the updated dataset. Since the model is trained with more clean samples and records more accurate false predictions for sample selection, the generalization performance of the model gradually increases. We evaluated our method on two benchmark datasets, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 with synthetically generated noisy labels, and the obtained results which are better than or comparative to the-state-of-the-art approaches.