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Poster
Dual T: Reducing Estimation Error for Transition Matrix in Label-noise Learning
Yu Yao · Tongliang Liu · Bo Han · Mingming Gong · Jiankang Deng · Gang Niu · Masashi Sugiyama

Thu Dec 10 09:00 PM -- 11:00 PM (PST) @ Poster Session 6 #1821
The transition matrix, denoting the transition relationship from clean labels to noisy labels, is essential to build statistically consistent classifiers in label-noise learning. Existing methods for estimating the transition matrix rely heavily on estimating the noisy class posterior. However, the estimation error for noisy class posterior could be large because of the randomness of label noise. The estimation error would lead the transition matrix to be poorly estimated. Therefore in this paper, we aim to solve this problem by exploiting the divide-and-conquer paradigm. Specifically, we introduce an intermediate class to avoid directly estimating the noisy class posterior. By this intermediate class, the original transition matrix can then be factorized into the product of two easy-to-estimated transition matrices. We term the proposed method as the dual $T$-estimator. Both theoretical analyses and empirical results illustrate the effectiveness of the dual $T$-estimator for estimating transition matrices, leading to better classification performances.

#### Author Information

##### Gang Niu (RIKEN)

Gang Niu is currently a research scientist (indefinite-term) at RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project. He received the PhD degree in computer science from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2013. Before joining RIKEN as a research scientist, he was a senior software engineer at Baidu and then an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo. He has published more than 70 journal articles and conference papers, including 14 NeurIPS (1 oral and 3 spotlights), 28 ICML, and 2 ICLR (1 oral) papers. He has served as an area chair 14 times, including ICML 2019--2021, NeurIPS 2019--2021, and ICLR 2021--2022.