利用神经坍缩几何特性,让主动学习在错误标签下仍可靠。
Reliable Active Learning from Unreliable Labels via Neural Collapse Geometry
- 通过类中心对齐和特征波动度量样本几何稳定性
- 在ImageNet-100和CIFAR100上用更少标签达更高准确率
- 适合标注噪声大或分布偏移场景的主动学习应用
主动学习(AL)旨在通过优先选择信息量大的样本降低标注成本,但当标签噪声或数据分布漂移时其可靠性下降。现实中标注者会出错,稀有类别定义模糊,传统AL准则(如不确定性、多样性)常重复选错标或冗余样本。我们提出基于神经坍缩几何的可靠主动学习(NCAL-R),利用深度网络的隐含几何规律对抗不可靠监督。方法引入两个互补信号:(i) 类中心对齐扰动得分,衡量候选样本对类间几何结构的稳定或破坏程度;(ii) 特征波动得分,捕捉训练过程中表示的时序不稳定性。结合两者可优先选择既保持类间分离又凸显模糊区域的样本,缓解噪声与冗余标签影响。在ImageNet-100和CIFAR100上的实验表明,NCAL-R持续优于标准基线,以更少标签实现更高准确率,在合成标签噪声下鲁棒性更强,且对分布外数据泛化能力更优。结果表明,将几何可靠性纳入采样决策可使主动学习更抗标注误差与分布偏移,是真实标注流程中可信部署的关键一步。代码已开源于https://github.com/Vision-IIITD/NCAL。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Active Learning (AL) promises to reduce annotation cost by prioritizing informative samples, yet its reliability is undermined when labels are noisy or when the data distribution shifts. In practice, annotators make mistakes, rare categories are ambiguous, and conventional AL heuristics (uncertainty, diversity) often amplify such errors by repeatedly selecting mislabeled or redundant samples. We propose Reliable Active Learning via Neural Collapse Geometry (NCAL-R), a framework that leverages the emergent geometric regularities of deep networks to counteract unreliable supervision. Our method introduces two complementary signals: (i) a Class-Mean Alignment Perturbation score, which quantifies how candidate samples structurally stabilize or distort inter-class geometry, and (ii) a Feature Fluctuation score, which captures temporal instability of representations across training checkpoints. By combining these signals, NCAL-R prioritizes samples that both preserve class separation and highlight ambiguous regions, mitigating the effect of noisy or redundant labels. Experiments on ImageNet-100 and CIFAR100 show that NCAL-R consistently outperforms standard AL baselines, achieving higher accuracy with fewer labels, improved robustness under synthetic label noise, and stronger generalization to out-of-distribution data. These results suggest that incorporating geometric reliability criteria into acquisition decisions can make Active Learning less brittle to annotation errors and distribution shifts, a key step toward trustworthy deployment in real-world labeling pipelines. Our code is available at https://github.com/Vision-IIITD/NCAL.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。