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Poster
Instance-dependent Label-noise Learning under a Structural Causal Model
Nick Yao · Tongliang Liu · Mingming Gong · Bo Han · Gang Niu · Kun Zhang

Tue Dec 07 08:30 AM -- 10:00 AM (PST) @ None #None
Label noise generally degenerates the performance of deep learning algorithms because deep neural networks easily overfit label errors. Let $X$ and $Y$ denote the instance and clean label, respectively. When $Y$ is a cause of $X$, according to which many datasets have been constructed, e.g., \textit{SVHN} and \textit{CIFAR}, the distributions of $P(X)$ and $P(Y|X)$ are generally entangled. This means that the unsupervised instances are helpful to learn the classifier and thus reduce the side effect of label noise. However, it remains elusive on how to exploit the causal information to handle the label-noise problem. We propose to model and make use of the causal process in order to correct the label-noise effect.Empirically, the proposed method outperforms all state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world label-noise datasets.

#### 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.