Towards Robust Multi-Label Learning against Dirty Label Noise

In multi-label learning, one of the major challenges is that the data are associated with label noise including the random noisy labels (e.g., data encoding errors) and noisy labels created by annotators (e.g., missing, extra, or error label), where noise is promoted by different structures (e.g., gaussian, sparse or subjective). Existing methods are tailored to handle noise with one specific structure. However, they lack of consideration of the fact that the data are always with dirty noisy labels, simutaneously gaussian, sparse and subjective, in real applications. In this paper, we formalize the multi-label learning with dirty noise as a new learning problem, namely Noisy Multi-label Learning (NML). To solve the NML problem, we decompose a corrupted label matrix as the noise matrix plus a true label matrix (maybe high-rank). For the noise matrix, a mixed norm penalty is developed as regularizer for dirty noise distribution. Under this norm, the conditions required for exact noise recovery are provided theoretically. For the true label matrix that is not necessarily low-rank, we apply a non-linear mapping to ensure its low-rankness such that the high-order label correlation can be utilized. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly.