Large datasets often have unreliable labels-such as those obtained from Amazon's Mechanical Turk or social media platforms-and classifiers trained on mislabeled datasets often exhibit poor performance. We present a simple, effective technique for accounting for label noise when training deep neural networks. We augment a standard deep network with a softmax layer that models the label noise statistics. Then, we train the deep network and noise model jointly via end-to-end stochastic gradient descent on the (perhaps mislabeled) dataset. The augmented model is overdetermined, so in order to encourage the learning of a non-trivial noise model, we apply dropout regularization to the weights of the noise model during training. Numerical experiments on noisy versions of the CIFAR-10 and MNIST datasets show that the proposed dropout technique outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
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