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Poster
Understanding and Improving Early Stopping for Learning with Noisy Labels
Yingbin Bai · Erkun Yang · Bo Han · Yanhua Yang · Jiatong Li · Yinian Mao · Gang Niu · Tongliang Liu

Thu Dec 09 04:30 PM -- 06:00 PM (PST) @ None #None
in Poster Session 7 »

The memorization effect of deep neural network (DNN) plays a pivotal role in many state-of-the-art label-noise learning methods. To exploit this property, the early stopping trick, which stops the optimization at the early stage of training, is usually adopted. Current methods generally decide the early stopping point by considering a DNN as a whole. However, a DNN can be considered as a composition of a series of layers, and we find that the latter layers in a DNN are much more sensitive to label noise, while their former counterparts are quite robust. Therefore, selecting a stopping point for the whole network may make different DNN layers antagonistically affect each other, thus degrading the final performance. In this paper, we propose to separate a DNN into different parts and progressively train them to address this problem. Instead of the early stopping which trains a whole DNN all at once, we initially train former DNN layers by optimizing the DNN with a relatively large number of epochs. During training, we progressively train the latter DNN layers by using a smaller number of epochs with the preceding layers fixed to counteract the impact of noisy labels. We term the proposed method as progressive early stopping (PES). Despite its simplicity, compared with the traditional early stopping, PES can help to obtain more promising and stable results. Furthermore, by combining PES with existing approaches on noisy label training, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on image classification benchmarks. The code is made public at https://github.com/tmllab/PES.

Keywords: Deep Learning · Optimization · Machine Learning · Vision

Author Information

Yingbin Bai (The University of Sydney)
Erkun Yang (Xidian University)
Bo Han (HKBU / RIKEN)
Yanhua Yang (Xidian University)
Jiatong Li (University of Technology Sydney)
Yinian Mao (Meituan)
Gang Niu (RIKEN)

Gang Niu is currently a research scientist (indefinite-term) at RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project. He received the PhD degree in computer science from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2013. Before joining RIKEN as a research scientist, he was a senior software engineer at Baidu and then an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo. He has published more than 70 journal articles and conference papers, including 14 NeurIPS (1 oral and 3 spotlights), 28 ICML, and 2 ICLR (1 oral) papers. He has served as an area chair 14 times, including ICML 2019--2021, NeurIPS 2019--2021, and ICLR 2021--2022.

Tongliang Liu (The University of Sydney)

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