English

NoiseRank: Unsupervised Label Noise Reduction with Dependence Models

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2020-03-17 v1 Machine Learning Machine Learning

Abstract

Label noise is increasingly prevalent in datasets acquired from noisy channels. Existing approaches that detect and remove label noise generally rely on some form of supervision, which is not scalable and error-prone. In this paper, we propose NoiseRank, for unsupervised label noise reduction using Markov Random Fields (MRF). We construct a dependence model to estimate the posterior probability of an instance being incorrectly labeled given the dataset, and rank instances based on their estimated probabilities. Our method 1) Does not require supervision from ground-truth labels, or priors on label or noise distribution. 2) It is interpretable by design, enabling transparency in label noise removal. 3) It is agnostic to classifier architecture/optimization framework and content modality. These advantages enable wide applicability in real noise settings, unlike prior works constrained by one or more conditions. NoiseRank improves state-of-the-art classification on Food101-N (~20% noise), and is effective on high noise Clothing-1M (~40% noise).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.06729,
  title  = {NoiseRank: Unsupervised Label Noise Reduction with Dependence Models},
  author = {Karishma Sharma and Pinar Donmez and Enming Luo and Yan Liu and I. Zeki Yalniz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.06729},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:14:59.370Z