Searching for Robustness: Loss Learning for Noisy Classification Tasks

Abstract

We present a "learning to learn" approach for discovering white-box classification loss functions that are robust to label noise in the training data. We parameterise a flexible family of loss functions using Taylor polynomials, and apply evolutionary strategies to search for noise-robust losses in this space. To learn re-usable loss functions that can apply to new tasks, our fitness function scores their performance in aggregate across a range of training datasets and architectures. The resulting white-box loss provides a simple and fast "plug-and-play" module that enables effective label-noise-robust learning in diverse downstream tasks, without requiring a special training procedure or network architecture. The efficacy of our loss is demonstrated on a variety of datasets with both synthetic and real label noise, where we compare favourably to prior work.