MetaCleaner: Learning to Hallucinate Clean Representations for Noisy-Labeled Visual Recognition

Weihe Zhang, Yali Wang, Yu Qiao; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 7373-7382

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable successes in large-scale visual recognition. However, they often suffer from overfitting under noisy labels. To alleviate this problem, we propose a conceptually simple but effective MetaCleaner, which can learn to hallucinate a clean representation of an object category, according to a small noisy subset from the same category. Specially, MetaCleaner consists of two flexible submodules. The first submodule, namely Noisy Weighting, can estimate the confidence scores of all the images in the noisy subset, by analyzing their deep features jointly. The second submodule, namely Clean Hallucinating, can generate a clean representation from the noisy subset, by summarizing the noisy images with their confidence scores. Via MetaCleaner, DNNs can strengthen its robustness to noisy labels, as well as enhance its generalization capacity with richer data diversity. Moreover, MetaCleaner can be easily integrated into the standard training procedure of DNNs, which promotes its value for real-life applications. We conduct extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks in noisy-labeled recognition, i.e., Food-101N and Clothing1M. For both datasets, our MetaCleaner significantly outperforms baselines, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.