Learning from noisy large-scale datasets with minimal supervision

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articleResearchpeer-review

We present an approach to effectively use millions of images with noisy annotations in conjunction with a small subset of cleanly-annotated images to learn powerful image representations. One common approach to combine clean and noisy data is to first pre-train a network using the large noisy dataset and then fine-tune with the clean dataset. We show this approach does not fully leverage the information contained in the clean set. Thus, we demonstrate how to use the clean annotations to reduce the noise in the large dataset before fine-tuning the network using both the clean set and the full set with reduced noise. The approach comprises a multi-task network that jointly learns to clean noisy annotations and to accurately classify images. We evaluate our approach on the recently released Open Images dataset, containing ∼9 million images, multiple annotations per image and over 6000 unique classes. For the small clean set of annotations we use a quarter of the validation set with ∼40k images. Our results demonstrate that the proposed approach clearly outperforms direct fine-tuning across all major categories of classes in the Open Image dataset. Further, our approach is particularly effective for a large number of classes with wide range of noise in annotations (20-80% false positive annotations).

Original languageEnglish
JournalProceedings - 30th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2017
Pages (from-to)6575-6583
Number of pages9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 6 Nov 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event30th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2017 - Honolulu, United States
Duration: 21 Jul 201726 Jul 2017

Conference

Conference30th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2017
CountryUnited States
CityHonolulu
Period21/07/201726/07/2017

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We would like to thank Ramakrishna Vedantam for insightful feedback as well as the AOL Connected Experiences Laboratory at Cornell Tech. This work was funded in part by a Google Focused Research Award.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 IEEE.

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