Understanding and Mitigating the Bias in Sample Selection for Learning with Noisy Labels

Learning with noisy labels aims to ensure model generalization given a label-corrupted training set. The sample selection strategy achieves promising performance by selecting a label-reliable subset for model training. In this paper, we empirically reveal that existing sample selection methods suffer from both data and training bias that are represented as imbalanced selected sets and accumulation errors in practice, respectively. However, only the training bias was handled in previous studies. To address this limitation, we propose a noIse-Tolerant Expert Model (ITEM) for debiased learning in sample selection. Specifically, to mitigate the training bias, we design a robust network architecture that integrates with multiple experts. Compared with the prevailing double-branch network, our network exhibits better performance of selection and prediction by ensembling these experts while training with fewer parameters. Meanwhile, to mitigate the data bias, we propose a mixed sampling strategy based on two weight-based data samplers. By training on the mixture of two class-discriminative mini-batches, the model mitigates the effect of the imbalanced training set while avoiding sparse representations that are easily caused by sampling strategies. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of ITEM. Our code is available at this url hrefhttps://github.com/1998v7/ITEMITEM.