Learning label smoothing for text classification

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2024 Apr 23:10:e2005. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.2005. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Training with soft labels instead of hard labels can effectively improve the robustness and generalization of deep learning models. Label smoothing often provides uniformly distributed soft labels during the training process, whereas it does not take the semantic difference of labels into account. This article introduces discrimination-aware label smoothing, an adaptive label smoothing approach that learns appropriate distributions of labels for iterative optimization objectives. In this approach, positive and negative samples are employed to provide experience from both sides, and the performances of regularization and model calibration are improved through an iterative learning method. Experiments on five text classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords: Excessive regularization; Label smoothing; Neural network; Soft label; Text classification.

Grants and funding

This work is supported by the Major Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education (Grant No. 21JDA050), the Research Fund of National Language Commission (Grant No.YB145-2), the Guangdong Education Department Project Foundation (Grant Nos. 2017KTSCX064, 2023WTSCX017), the Guangdong Philosophy and Social Sciences Foundation (Grant Nos. GD20XZY01, GD24CWY11), the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies Project Foundation (Grant Nos. LAI202305, LEC2019ZBKT002, LEC2022ZBKT005), the Guangzhou Science and Technology Project Foundation (Grant No. 202201010717), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61977032) and the Hainan Natural Science Foundation (Grant Nos. 620QN282, 621MS054). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.