CleanNet: Transfer Learning for Scalable Image Classifier Training with Label Noise

In this paper, we study the problem of learning image classification models with label noise. Existing approaches depending on human supervision are generally not scalable as manually identifying correct or incorrect labels is time-consuming, whereas approaches not relying on human supervision are scalable but less effective. To reduce the amount of human supervision for label noise cleaning, we introduce CleanNet, a joint neural embedding network, which only requires a fraction of the classes being manually verified to provide the knowledge of label noise that can be transferred to other classes. We further integrate CleanNet and conventional convolutional neural network classifier into one framework for image classification learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on both of the label noise detection task and the image classification on noisy data task on several large-scale datasets. Experimental results show that CleanNet can reduce label noise detection error rate on held-out classes where no human supervision available by 41.5% compared to current weakly supervised methods. It also achieves 47% of the performance gain of verifying all images with only 3.2% images verified on an image classification task. Source code and dataset will be available at kuanghuei.github.io/CleanNetProject.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 201

FAME: Face Association through Model Evolution

We attack the problem of learning face models for public faces from weakly-labelled images collected from web through querying a name. The data is very noisy even after face detection, with several irrelevant faces corresponding to other people. We propose a novel method, Face Association through Model Evolution (FAME), that is able to prune the data in an iterative way, for the face models associated to a name to evolve. The idea is based on capturing discriminativeness and representativeness of each instance and eliminating the outliers. The final models are used to classify faces on novel datasets with possibly different characteristics. On benchmark datasets, our results are comparable to or better than state-of-the-art studies for the task of face identification.Comment: Draft version of the stud

BlogForever D2.6: Data Extraction Methodology

This report outlines an inquiry into the area of web data extraction, conducted within the context of blog preservation. The report reviews theoretical advances and practical developments for implementing data extraction. The inquiry is extended through an experiment that demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of implementing some of the suggested approaches. More specifically, the report discusses an approach based on unsupervised machine learning that employs the RSS feeds and HTML representations of blogs. It outlines the possibilities of extracting semantics available in blogs and demonstrates the benefits of exploiting available standards such as microformats and microdata. The report proceeds to propose a methodology for extracting and processing blog data to further inform the design and development of the BlogForever platform