# Co-matching: Combating Noisy Labels by Augmentation Anchoring

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.12814 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12814/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03530/) (2016)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05394/) (2017)
- [DivideMix: Learning with Noisy Labels as Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07394/) (2020)
- [Learning to Reweight Examples for Robust Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09050/) (2018)
- [Making Deep Neural Networks Robust to Label Noise: a Loss Correction Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03683/) (2016)
- [MentorNet: Learning Data-Driven Curriculum for Very Deep Neural Networks on Corrupted Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05055/) (2017)
- [Symmetric Cross Entropy for Robust Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06112/) (2019)
- [Robust Loss Functions under Label Noise for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09482/) (2017)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [How does Disagreement Help Generalization against Label Corruption?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04215/) (2019)
- [ReMixMatch: Semi-Supervised Learning with Distribution Alignment and Augmentation Anchoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09785/) (2019)
- [Training Deep Neural Networks on Noisy Labels with Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6596/) (2014)
- [Joint Optimization Framework for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11364/) (2018)
- [Combating noisy labels by agreement: A joint training method with co-regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02752/) (2020)
- [WebVision Database: Visual Learning and Understanding from Web Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02862/) (2017)
- [Learning with Pseudo-Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.4864/) (2014)
- [Decoupling "when to update" from "how to update"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02613/) (2017)
- [Using Trusted Data to Train Deep Networks on Labels Corrupted by Severe Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05300/) (2018)
- [Probabilistic End-to-end Noise Correction for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07788/) (2019)
- [Understanding and Utilizing Deep Neural Networks Trained with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05040/) (2019)
- [Are Anchor Points Really Indispensable in Label-Noise Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00189/) (2019)
- [Dimensionality-Driven Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02612/) (2018)
- [SELF: Learning to Filter Noisy Labels with Self-Ensembling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01842/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Not All Negatives are Equal: Label-Aware Contrastive Loss for Fine-grained Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05427/) (2021)
- [Centrality and Consistency: Two-Stage Clean Samples Identification for Learning with Instance-Dependent Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14476/) (2022)
- [Confidence Adaptive Regularization for Deep Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08212/) (2021)
- [Combating Noisy Labels in Long-Tailed Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00273/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning with noisy labels is challenging as deep neural networks have the high capacity to memorize the noisy labels. In this paper, we propose a learning algorithm called Co-matching, which balances the consistency and divergence between two networks by augmentation anchoring. Specifically, we have one network generate anchoring label from its prediction on a weakly-augmented image. Meanwhile, we force its peer network, taking the strongly-augmented version of the same image as input, to generate prediction close to the anchoring label. We then update two networks simultaneously by selecting small-loss instances to minimize both unsupervised matching loss (i.e., measure the consistency of the two networks) and supervised classification loss (i.e. measure the classification performance). Besides, the unsupervised matching loss makes our method not heavily rely on noisy labels, which prevents memorization of noisy labels. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that Co-matching achieves results comparable to the state-of-the-art methods.