13 KiB
- impl/research
- Key Papers
- Competing Strategies
- Dataset Coverage vs Literature
- Recommendations for Baseline Strengthening
- Noisy Labels Literature
- Competing Method Concepts
- Noisy Label Datasets (real-world, from the literature)
- Surveys
- Robust Loss Functions
- Label Correction / Transition Matrix
- Sample Selection
- Semi-Supervised / DivideMix Family
- AUC / Ranking Objectives and Noise Robustness
- BibTeX Entries (staged here; move to thesis.bib when writing sec:noisy-labels)
- Paper Subnodes
impl/research
Survey of academic literature on class imbalance in deep learning, relevant to ROLL's thesis positioning.
Key Papers
| Paper | Venue | Node |
|---|---|---|
| CLIMB (arXiv:2505.17451) | NeurIPS 2025 | — |
| impl/paper-beyond-rebalancing | 2024 | detailed node |
| Simplifying NN Training Under Class Imbalance (arXiv:2312.02517) | 2023 | — |
| Investigating Group DRO (arXiv:2303.02505) | 2023 | — |
| impl/paper-tabpfn | ICLR 2023 | detailed node |
| Survey on Imbalanced Learning (Springer 2024) | Springer AI Review | — |
| Rethinking Class Imbalance (arXiv:2305.03900) | 2023 | — |
Competing Strategies
Methods the literature benchmarks against (relevant as ROLL baselines):
- Resampling: SMOTE, ADASYN, CSMOUTE, BorderlineSMOTE, ROSE
- Cost-sensitive: class weighting, focal loss, asymmetric loss
- Ensemble: BalancedBagging, EasyEnsemble, RUSBoost, BalancedRandomForest
- Threshold moving: post-hoc calibration on decision threshold
- DL-specific: LDAM-DRW, M2m, MiSLAS, BBN (mostly image long-tail)
- Tabular DL baselines: XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, MLP, ResNet, FT-Transformer, impl/paper-tabpfn
- CLIMB finding: ensembles dominate; naive rebalancing (SMOTE alone) often underperforms
Metrics used: AUC-ROC, G-Mean, F1, Precision/Recall. AUC and G-Mean are the standard for imbalanced eval. ROLL's TPR-at-FPR framing is non-standard but more practically useful — position this as an advantage.
Dataset Coverage vs Literature
Well Covered by ROLL
- All glass variants (glass0–6) — standard KEEL
- Yeast3, ecoli-0-1_vs_5, wisconsin, cleveland, pima, haberman, iris0, vowel0, vehicle2, page-blocks, new-thyroid1, led7digit
- Adult, Forest Cover, Bank Marketing (medium tabular)
- Credit Card Fraud (~285K, IR 577:1) — common in fraud literature
Gaps vs Literature (datasets in papers ROLL doesn't have)
| Dataset | IR | Samples | Appears In |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abalone9-18 | ~130 | 731 | Beyond Rebalancing, CLIMB |
| Annthyroid | 7.2 | 6916 | Beyond Rebalancing, many UCI surveys |
| Satellite | 22 | 6435 | Beyond Rebalancing |
| Segment | 6 | 2310 | Beyond Rebalancing |
| Yeast4/5/6 | 8–33 | ~1484 | Beyond Rebalancing, CLIMB |
| Ecoli4 | 15.8 | 336 | Beyond Rebalancing |
| KC1/KC2/PC1/CM1 (software) | 5–13 | 415–1783 | Beyond Rebalancing |
| Pen-local/Pen-global | 9–671 | 7291 | Beyond Rebalancing |
Non-Standard or Unusual in ROLL
- Higgs: ROLL samples 500K balanced (50/50) — not a standard imbalanced benchmark; physics ML context
- Home Credit: Kaggle competition dataset; rare in academic imbalance papers
- CIFAR-10 binary (class 1 vs rest, IR ~9): DL imbalance papers use long-tail formulation instead — results not directly comparable to LDAM/MiSLAS tables
Recommendations for Baseline Strengthening
Priority additions (available in KEEL, low effort):
- Yeast4, Yeast5, Yeast6 — stress-test high IR range
- Annthyroid — one of the most cited UCI imbalanced datasets
- Abalone9-18 — extreme IR (130:1), covers the hard regime
- Ecoli4 — rounds out ecoli coverage at IR 15.8
Lower priority (useful if sweeping many baselines):
- Satellite, Segment, Pen-local — common in full KEEL sweeps
- KC1/PC1 — software metrics datasets; different domain from biology/finance
Noisy Labels Literature
Sources found 2026-07-13 for thesis sec:noisy-labels (section 2.5 in related work chapter). Poisoning finding: label-poisoning (true positives duplicated with flipped label) hurts bce-weighted more than roll. ROLL's distributional/threshold objective is structurally more robust to class-conditional label noise without any explicit noise-handling mechanism.
Competing Method Concepts
Four families per Li & Zhu survey (arXiv:2404.04159). All require knowing or estimating something about the noise; ROLL requires none of it.
1. Robust Loss Functions — change the loss so mislabeled samples cannot dominate the gradient.
- Key insight: symmetry condition (Ghosh 2017): sum_k l(f(x),k)=C => noise-tolerant. CE fails this; MAE satisfies it.
- MAE: provably tolerant, very slow to converge.
- GCE / L_q (Zhang & Sabuncu 2018): interpolates MAE<->CE via q. Tune for tradeoff.
- Asymmetric losses (Zhou 2021): saturate on suspected noisy samples; different margins per class direction. Suited to class-conditional noise.
- Label smoothing: a soft regularization variant; does not fully satisfy symmetry condition but reduces overconfidence on noisy labels.
- Requires: approximate noise rate to choose hyperparameters.
2. Noise Transition Matrix / Label Correction — model the corruption explicitly.
- Estimate T where T[i,j] = P(observed label j | true label i).
- Forward correction (Patrini 2017): multiply model output by T-1 before the loss.
- Requires: a clean anchor set or structural assumptions about T. Hard for one-sided asymmetric noise (our poisoning: only positives corrupted) without an anchor.
- Representative methods: GLC, RoG, CAN, Noise Adaptation Layer.
3. Sample Selection — identify and train only on likely-clean samples.
- Memorization effect: DNNs fit clean patterns first, noisy labels late in training. Small-loss samples early on are likely clean.
- Co-teaching (Han 2018): two nets cross-select small-loss samples each epoch.
- MentorNet, JoCoR, TopoFilter, MORPH are variants.
- Requires: two models; breaks down at high noise or with imbalance (minority samples often have high loss even when clean, so they get incorrectly filtered out).
4. Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL)-Based — treat noisy samples as unlabeled, not wrong.
- Divide training into clean (labeled) and noisy (unlabeled) subsets, then run SSL.
- DivideMix: fits a mixture model to per-sample loss to decide clean/noisy split, then applies MixMatch. The dominant method on standard benchmarks as of 2024.
- Other representatives: SELFIE, Jo-SRC, UNICON, TCL, SoftMatch.
- Requires: reliable clean/noisy split; the mixture model can fail under imbalance because minority-class loss distributions overlap with noisy majority distributions.
Common thread: all four families are corrective — they assume or estimate noise structure. ROLL's robustness is structural (distributional objective), not corrective.
Benchmark gap (confirmed by Li & Zhu 2024): the entire field evaluates on multi-class image datasets with synthetic symmetric/asymmetric noise or a handful of real web-scraped image datasets (Clothing1M ~38.5% noise, Food-101N ~18.4%, ANIMAL-10N ~8%, WebVision ~20%, CIFAR-10N/100N human-reannotated). No tabular data, no binary imbalanced setting, no one-sided minority-class corruption anywhere in the standard benchmark suite.
Noisy Label Datasets (real-world, from the literature)
| Dataset | Size | Noise rate | Domain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clothing1M | ~1M | ~38.5% | clothing images (web) |
| Food-101N | ~310K | ~18.4% | food images (web) |
| ANIMAL-10N | 55K | ~8% | animal images |
| WebVision | 2.5M | ~20% | general web images |
| CIFAR-10N / CIFAR-100N | 50K | varies | CIFAR re-annotated by humans |
All are image datasets. No standard noisy-label tabular benchmark exists.
Surveys
| Key | Venue | arXiv / DOI | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| song2022survey | IEEE TNNLS 2022/23 | 10.1109/TNNLS.2022.3152527 | Main survey; 62 methods in 5 categories |
| survey2025label | Systems Sci & Control Eng 2025 | 10.1080/21642583.2025.2488120 | Deep learning focus; 5-type taxonomy |
| li2024noisy | arXiv:2404.04159 (Apr 2024) | — | Li & Zhu; 4-category taxonomy; confirmed no binary/imbalanced coverage |
Robust Loss Functions
| Key | Venue | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ghosh2017robust | AAAI 2017, arXiv:1712.09482 | Symmetry condition: sum_k l(f(x),k)=C => noise-tolerant; CE fails; MAE passes |
| zhang2018generalized | NeurIPS 2018 | GCE: L_q interpolates MAE<->CE via q; q->0 = MAE, q->1 = CE |
| zhou2021asymmetric | ICML 2021, PMLR v139 | Asymmetric loss; different margins per class; suited to class-conditional noise |
| feng2020can | IJCAI 2020 | Can CE be robust? — only under very restricted conditions |
| symmetrization2025 | arXiv:2605.20347 | Symmetrize any loss via additive complement (2025) |
Label Correction / Transition Matrix
| Key | Venue | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| patrini2017making | CVPR 2017 | Estimate T[i,j]=P(y_tilde=j | y=i); correct logits by T-1. Canonical forward-correction |
| cannings2020classification | Biometrika 2020, arXiv:1805.11505 | kNN/SVM robust to imperfect labels; LDA not unless class priors equal |
Sample Selection
| Key | Venue | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| han2018coteaching | NeurIPS 2018 | Co-teaching: two nets select small-loss samples for each other per epoch |
Semi-Supervised / DivideMix Family
| Key | Venue | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| dividemix | ICLR 2020 | Dominant SSL-based method; GMM splits clean/noisy, then MixMatch |
AUC / Ranking Objectives and Noise Robustness
| Key | Venue | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| xie2024wsauc | IEEE TPAMI 2024, arXiv:2305.14258 | WSAUC/rpAUC; unifies weak supervision for AUC; rpAUC removes high-loss pairs — more robust under noisy labels. ADDED to thesis.bib |
| auc2025retrieval | arXiv:2510.00137 | AUC-driven learning for neural retrieval; robustness framing |
BibTeX Entries (staged here; move to thesis.bib when writing sec:noisy-labels)
@article{song2022survey,
title={Learning From Noisy Labels With Deep Neural Networks: A Survey},
author={Song, Hwanjun and Kim, Minseok and Park, Dongkwan and Shin, Yooju and Lee, Jae-Gil},
journal={IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems},
volume={34},
number={11},
pages={8135--8153},
year={2023},
doi={10.1109/TNNLS.2022.3152527}
}
@article{li2024noisy,
title={Noisy Label Processing for Classification: A Survey},
author={Li, Mengting and Zhu, Chuang},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.04159},
year={2024}
}
@inproceedings{ghosh2017robust,
title={Robust Loss Functions under Label Noise for Deep Neural Networks},
author={Ghosh, Aritra and Kumar, Himanshu and Sastry, P. S.},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
pages={1919--1925},
year={2017}
}
@inproceedings{patrini2017making,
title={Making Deep Neural Networks Robust to Label Noise: A Loss Correction Approach},
author={Patrini, Giorgio and Rozza, Alessandro and Krishna Menon, Aditya and Nock, Richard and Qu, Lizhen},
booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
pages={1944--1952},
year={2017}
}
@inproceedings{zhang2018generalized,
title={Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels},
author={Zhang, Zhilu and Sabuncu, Mert R.},
booktitle={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
volume={31},
year={2018}
}
@inproceedings{han2018coteaching,
title={Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels},
author={Han, Bo and Yao, Quanming and Yu, Xingrui and Niu, Gang and Xu, Miao and Hu, Weihua and Tsang, Ivor W. and Sugiyama, Masashi},
booktitle={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
volume={31},
year={2018}
}
@inproceedings{zhou2021asymmetric,
title={Asymmetric Loss Functions for Learning with Noisy Labels},
author={Zhou, Xiong and Liu, Xianming and Jiang, Junjun and Gao, Xin and Ji, Xiangyang},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages={12846--12856},
year={2021},
volume={139},
series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
publisher={PMLR}
}
@inproceedings{feng2020can,
title={Can Cross Entropy Loss Be Robust to Label Noise?},
author={Feng, Lei and Shu, Senlin and Lin, Zhuoyi and Lv, Fengmei and Li, Li and An, Bo},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
pages={2206--2212},
year={2020}
}
@article{cannings2020classification,
title={Classification with imperfect training labels},
author={Cannings, Timothy I. and Fan, Yingying and Samworth, Richard J.},
journal={Biometrika},
volume={107},
number={2},
pages={311--330},
year={2020},
doi={10.1093/biomet/asaa011}
}
@article{symmetrization2025,
title={Symmetrization of Loss Functions for Robust Training of Neural Networks
in the Presence of Noisy Labels},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.20347},
year={2025}
}
@article{auc2025retrieval,
title={Optimizing What Matters: {AUC}-Driven Learning for Robust Neural Retrieval},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.00137},
year={2025}
}
Paper Subnodes
- impl/paper-tabpfn — TabPFN: in-context learning for small tabular classification (ICLR 2023)
- impl/paper-beyond-rebalancing — benchmark of 12 classifiers under imbalance, no rebalancing (2024)