Abstract

To address the problem of incorrect labels in training data for deep learning, we propose a novel and simple training strategy, Iterative Cross Learning (ICL), that significantly improves the classification accuracy of neural networks with training data that has noisy labels. We randomly partition the noisy training data into multiple separate subsets, each of which is used to train an independent network. After these independent networks predict labels for the original data, if the labels agree, we update the label with the predicted result for that data point, but otherwise we update the label with a random label, a key to the success of our proposed method. The process is repeated, possibly with several stages, to gradually improve the performance. Testing our method on MNIST and CIFAR-10 with partially shuffled labels, ICL significantly improves the classification accuracy of existing methods when the data labels have noise, especially in heavy noise situations. Moreover, the proposed method doesn’t require any change to the underlying neural networks’ structure or loss function, so it can also easily be combined with other existing methods that address noisy labels, improving their performance.