Stochastic co-teaching for training neural networks with unknown levels of label noise

Label noise hampers supervised training of neural networks. However, data without label noise is often infeasible to attain, especially for medical tasks. Attaining high-quality medical labels would require a pool of experts and their consensus reading, which would be extremely costly. Several methods have been proposed to mitigate the adverse effects of label noise during training. State-of-the-art methods use multiple networks that exploit different decision boundaries to identify label noise. Among the best performing methods is co-teaching. However, co-teaching comes with the requirement of knowing label noise a priori. Hence, we propose a co-teaching method that does not require any prior knowledge about the level of label noise. We introduce stochasticity to select or reject training instances. We have extensively evaluated the method on synthetic experiments with extreme label noise levels and applied it to real-world medical problems of ECG classification and cardiac MRI segmentation. Results show that the approach is robust to its hyperparameter choice and applies to various classification tasks with unknown levels of label noise.