A Unified Framework for Connecting Noise Modeling to Boost Noise Detection

Abstract: Noisy labels can impair model performance, making the study of learning with noisy labels an important topic. Two conventional approaches are noise modeling and noise detection. However, these two methods are typically studied independently, and there has been limited work on their collaboration. In this work, we explore the integration of these two approaches, proposing an interconnected structure with three crucial blocks: noise modeling, source knowledge identification, and enhanced noise detection using noise source-knowledge-integration methods. This collaboration structure offers advantages such as discriminating hard negatives and preserving genuinely clean labels that might be suspiciously noisy. Our experiments on four datasets, featuring three types of noise and different combinations of each block, demonstrate the efficacy of these components' collaboration. Our collaborative structure methods achieve up to a 10% increase in top-1 classification accuracy in synthesized noise datasets and 3-5% in real-world noisy datasets. The results also suggest that these components make distinct contributions to overall performance across various noise scenarios. These findings provide valuable insights for designing noisy label learning methods customized for specific noise scenarios in the future. Our code is accessible to the public.