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Selfish Evolution: Making Discoveries in Extreme Label Noise (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Dec 18, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of stopping training before the model memorizes bad labels, this lets it overfit each sample and tracks how its predictions change. A second network reads those patterns to spot and fix wrong labels, and it worked on a supernova-hunting dataset and handwritten digits.

Abstract · Selfish Evolution: Making Discoveries in Extreme Label Noise with the Help of Overfitting Dynamics

Motivated by the scarcity of proper labels in an astrophysical application, we have developed a novel technique, called Selfish Evolution, which allows for the detection and correction of corrupted labels in a weakly supervised fashion. Unlike methods based on early stopping, we let the model train on the noisy dataset. Only then do we intervene and allow the model to overfit to individual samples. The ``evolution'' of the model during this process reveals patterns with enough information about the noisiness of the label, as well as its correct version. We train a secondary network on these spatiotemporal ``evolution cubes'' to correct potentially corrupted labels. We incorporate the technique in a closed-loop fashion, allowing for automatic convergence towards a mostly clean dataset, without presumptions about the state of the network in which we intervene. We evaluate on the main task of the Supernova-hunting dataset but also demonstrate efficiency on the more standard MNIST dataset.

Nima Sedaghat, Tanawan Chatchadanoraset, Colin Orion Chandler, Ashish Mahabal, Maryam Eslami
arXiv:2412.00077 · cs.CV, astro-ph.IM, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Nov 26, 2024
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