Label Noise: Ignorance is Bliss
summary
Defines relative signal strength as a pointwise measure of transferability between noisy and clean posteriors and proves matching upper and lower excess-risk bounds under that RSS model, showing an unavoidable epsilon-sized error term where transfer fails. Shows the simple Noise Ignorant Empirical Risk Minimization (NI-ERM) — run ERM on noisy labels as if they were clean — is minimax optimal under these conditions. Practically, fitting a linear classifier on DINOv2 features yields state‑of‑the‑art results on CIFAR-N (despite human label error rates ≈6% on ImageNet).
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:58Overview
- 9:45Label Noise
- 14:56Signal Strength
- 16:14Relative Signal Strength
- 18:49A Kappa
- 23:26Multiclass
- 24:05Example
- 30:54Theory vs Practice
- 32:50Experimental Results
- 37:56Discussion
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