Fairness Improves Learning from Noisily Labeled Long-Tailed Data

22 Sept 2023 (modified: 11 Feb 2024)Submitted to ICLR 2024EveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
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Primary Area: general machine learning (i.e., none of the above)
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Keywords: long-tailed data, noisy labels, fairness regularizer
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TL;DR: We show that regularizing the performance gap between any two sub-populations improves the learning from noisily labeled long-tailed data.
Abstract: Both long-tailed and noisily labeled data frequently appear in real-world applications and impose significant challenges for learning. Most prior works treat either problem in an isolated way and do not explicitly consider the coupling effects of the two. Our empirical observation reveals that such solutions fail to consistently improve the learning when the dataset is long-tailed with label noise. Moreover, with the presence of label noise, existing methods do not observe universal improvements across different sub-populations; in other words, some sub-populations enjoyed the benefits of improved accuracy at the cost of hurting others. Based on these observations, we introduce the Fairness Regularizer (FR), inspired by regularizing the performance gap between any two sub-populations. We show that the introduced fairness regularizer improves the performances of sub-populations on the tail and the overall learning performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution when complemented with certain existing popular robust or class-balanced methods.
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Submission Number: 4841
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