Robust Training with Ensemble Consensus

A BSTRACT Since deep neural networks are over-parametrized, they may memorize noisy examples. We address such memorizing issue under the existence of annotation noise. From the fact that deep neural networks cannot generalize neighborhoods of the features acquired via memorization, we find that noisy examples do not consistently incur small losses on the network in the presence of perturbation. Based on this, we propose a novel training method called Learning with Ensemble Consensus (LEC) whose goal is to prevent overfitting noisy examples by eliminating them identified via consensus of an ensemble of perturbed networks. One of the proposed LECs, L TEC outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 despite its efficient memory usage. 1 I NTRODUCTION Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown excellent performance (Krizhevsky et al., 2012; He et al., 2016) on visual recognition datasets (Deng et al., 2009). However, it is difficult to obtain annotated datasets of such high quality in practice (Wang et al., 2018a). Even worse, DNNs may not generalize training data in the presence of noisy examples (Zhang et al., 2016). Therefore, there is an increasing demand for robust training methods. In general, DNNs trained on noisy datasets first generalize clean examples (Arpit et al., 2017).