Soft Curriculum for Learning Conditional GANs With Noisy-Labeled and Uncurated Unlabeled Data

Kai Katsumata, Duc Minh Vo, Tatsuya Harada, Hideki Nakayama; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024, pp. 5323-5332

Label-noise or curated unlabeled data are used to compensate for the assumption of clean labeled data in training the conditional generative adversarial network; however, satisfying such an extended assumption is occasionally laborious or impractical. As a step towards generative modeling accessible to everyone, we introduce a novel conditional image generation framework that accepts noisy-labeled and uncurated unlabeled data during training: (i) closed-set and open-set label noise in labeled data and (ii) closed-set and open-set unlabeled data. To combat it, we propose soft curriculum learning, which assigns instance-wise weights for adversarial training while assigning new labels for unlabeled data and correcting wrong labels for labeled data. Unlike popular curriculum learning, which uses a threshold to pick the training samples, our soft curriculum controls the effect of each training instance by using the weights predicted by the auxiliary classifier, resulting in the preservation of useful samples while ignoring harmful ones. Our experiments show that our approach outperforms existing semi-supervised and label-noise robust methods in terms of both quantitative and qualitative performance. In particular, the proposed approach matches the performance of (semi-)supervised GANs even with less than half the labeled data.