Enhancing Multi-Label Text Classification under Label-Dependent Noise: A Label-Specific Denoising Framework

Pengyu Xu, Liping Jing, Jian Yu

Abstract: Recent advancements in noisy multi-label text classification have primarily relied on the class-conditional noise (CCN) assumption, which treats each label independently undergoing label flipping to generate noisy labels. However, in real-world scenarios, noisy labels often exhibit dependencies with true labels. In this study, we validate through hypothesis testing that real-world datasets are unlikely to adhere to the CCN assumption, indicating that label noise is dependent on the labels. To address this, we introduce a label-specific denoising framework designed to counteract label-dependent noise. The framework initially presents a holistic selection metric that evaluates noisy labels by concurrently considering loss information, ranking information, and feature centroid. Subsequently, it identifies and corrects noisy labels individually for each label category in a fine-grained manner. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method under both synthetic and real-world noise conditions, significantly improving performance over existing state-of-the-art models.