Multiplicative Reweighting for Robust Neural Network Optimization

Abstract: Neural networks are widespread due to their powerful performance. However, they degrade in the presence of noisy labels at training time. Inspired by the setting of learning with expert advice, where multiplicative weight (MW) updates were recently shown to be robust to moderate data corruptions in expert advice, we propose to use MW for reweighting examples during neural networks optimization. We theoretically establish the convergence of our method when used with gradient descent and prove its advantages in 1d cases. We then validate our findings empirically for the general case by showing that MW improves the accuracy of neural networks in the presence of label noise on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Clothing1M. We also show the impact of our approach on adversarial robustness.