Pi-DUAL: Using privileged information to distinguish clean from noisy labels

Ke Wang, Guillermo Ortiz-Jimenez, Rodolphe Jenatton, Mark Collier, Efi Kokiopoulou, Pascal Frossard

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

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Keywords: noisy labels, privileged information, supervised learning

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TL;DR: We introduce a new architecture to harness privileged information for the implicit differentiation of correct and wrong labels during training.

Abstract: Label noise is a pervasive problem in deep learning that often compromises the generalization performance of trained models. Recently, leveraging privileged information (PI) -- information available only during training but not at test time -- has emerged as an effective approach to mitigate this issue. Yet, existing PI-based methods have failed to consistently outperform their no-PI counterparts in terms of preventing overfitting to label noise. To address this deficiency, we introduce Pi-DUAL, an architecture designed to harness PI to distinguish clean from wrong labels. Pi-DUAL decomposes the output logits into a prediction term, based on conventional input features, and a noise-fitting term influenced solely by PI. A gating mechanism steered by PI adaptively shifts focus between these terms, allowing the model to implicitly separate the learning paths of clean and wrong labels. Empirically, Pi-DUAL achieves significant performance improvements on key PI benchmarks (e.g., +6.8% on ImageNet-PI), establishing a new state-of-the-art test set accuracy. Additionally, Pi-DUAL is a potent method for identifying noisy samples post-training, outperforming other strong methods at this task. Overall, Pi-DUAL is a simple, scalable and practical approach for mitigating the effects of label noise in a variety of real-world scenarios with PI.

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Submission Number: 5831