Robust Semisupervised Deep Generative Model Under Compound Noise

IEEE Trans Neural Netw Learn Syst. 2023 Mar;34(3):1179-1193. doi: 10.1109/TNNLS.2021.3105080. Epub 2023 Feb 28.

Abstract

Semisupervised learning has been widely applied to deep generative model such as variational autoencoder. However, there are still limited work in noise-robust semisupervised deep generative model where the noise exists in both of the data and the labels simultaneously, which are referred to as outliers and noisy labels or compound noise. In this article, we propose a novel noise-robust semisupervised deep generative model by jointly tackling the noisy labels and outliers in a unified robust semisupervised variational autoencoder randomized generative adversarial network (URSVAE-GAN). Typically, we consider the uncertainty of the information of the input data in order to enhance the robustness of the variational encoder toward the noisy data in our unified robust semisupervised variational autoencoder (URSVAE). Subsequently, in order to alleviate the detrimental effects of noisy labels, a denoising layer is integrated naturally into the semisupervised variational autoencoder so that the variational inference is conditioned on the corrected labels. Moreover, to enhance the robustness of the variational inference in the presence of outliers, the robust β -divergence measure is employed to derive the novel variational lower bound, which already achieves competitive performance. This further motivates the development of URSVAE-GAN that collapses the decoder of URSVAE and the generator of a robust semisupervised generative adversarial network into one unit. By applying the end-to-end denoising scheme in the joint optimization, the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework by the evaluating on image classification and face recognition tasks and comparing with the state-of-the-art approaches.