Label-noise learning (LNL) aims to increase the model's generalization given
training data with noisy labels. To facilitate practical LNL algorithms,
researchers have proposed different label noise types, ranging from
class-conditional to instance-dependent noises. In this paper, we introduce a
novel label noise type called BadLabel, which can significantly degrade the
performance of existing LNL algorithms by a large margin. BadLabel is crafted
based on the label-flipping attack against standard classification, where
specific samples are selected and their labels are flipped to other labels so
that the loss values of clean and noisy labels become indistinguishable. To
address the challenge posed by BadLabel, we further propose a robust LNL method
that perturbs the labels in an adversarial manner at each epoch to make the
loss values of clean and noisy labels again distinguishable. Once we select a
small set of (mostly) clean labeled data, we can apply the techniques of
semi-supervised learning to train the model accurately. Empirically, our
experimental results demonstrate that existing LNL algorithms are vulnerable to
the newly introduced BadLabel noise type, while our proposed robust LNL method
can effectively improve the generalization performance of the model under
various types of label noise. The new dataset of noisy labels and the source
codes of robust LNL algorithms are available at
https://github.com/zjfheart/BadLabels