Hi, Reddit. I’m excited to share confident learning for characterizing, finding, and learning with label errors in datasets. To promote and standardize future research in learning with noisy labels and weak supervision, I’ve also open-sourced the cleanlab Python package: https://pypi.org/project/cleanlab/

Post: https://l7.curtisnorthcutt.com/confident-learning

Title: Confident Learning: Uncertainty Estimation for Dataset Labels

Abstract: Learning exists in the context of data, yet notions of confidence typically focus on model predictions, not label quality. Confident learning (CL) has emerged as an approach for characterizing, identifying, and learning with noisy labels in datasets, based on the principles of pruning noisy data, counting to estimate noise, and ranking examples to train with confidence. Here, we generalize CL, building on the assumption of a classification noise process, to directly estimate the joint distribution between noisy (given) labels and uncorrupted (unknown) labels. This generalized CL, open-sourced as cleanlab, is provably consistent under reasonable conditions, and experimentally performant on ImageNet and CIFAR, outperforming recent approaches, e.g. MentorNet, by 30% or more, when label noise is non-uniform. cleanlab also quantifies ontological class overlap, and can increase model accuracy (e.g. ResNet) by providing clean data for training.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.00068
Code: https://github.com/cgnorthcutt/cleanlab/