Partial Label Learning with Noisy Labels

Abstract

Partial label learning (PLL) is a particular problem setting within weakly supervised learning. In PLL, each sample corresponds to a candidate label set in which only one label is true. However, in some practical application scenarios, the emergence of label noise can make some candidate sets lose their true labels, leading to a decline in model performance. In this work, a robust training strategy for PLL, derived from the joint training with co-regularization (JoCoR), is proposed to address this issue in PLL. Specifically, the proposed approach constructs two separate PLL models and a joint loss. The joint loss consists of not only two PLL losses but also a co-regularization term measuring the disagreement of the two models. By automatically selecting samples with small joint loss and using them to update the two models, our proposed approach is able to filter more and more suspected samples with noise candidate label sets. Gradually, the robustness of the PLL models to label noise strengthens due to the reduced disagreement of the two models. Experiments are conducted on two state-of-the-art PLL models using benchmark datasets under various noise levels. The results show that the proposed method can effectively stabilize the training process and reduce the model's overfitting to noisy candidate label sets.