Deep Learning With Noisy Labels for Spatiotemporal Drought Detection

Detecting frauds in computing platforms involves identifying malicious user activity sessions. Recently, deep learning models have been employed to design fraud detection approaches. Effective training of these deep learning models requires a large amount of well-annotated sessions. However, due to the cost of expert annotation, many organizations rely on heuristics to perform automated annotation, which leads to the noisy label learning problem. It is well known that the performance of deep learning models can easily degrade because of noisy or inaccurate labels. To tackle this challenge, we propose a supervised Contrastive Learning based Fraud Detection (CLFD) framework, which is designed to operate in the noisy label setting. CLFD employs an effective label corrector for correcting noisy labels and which is specifically designed for the fraud detection task. Then, by employing the corrected labels, it trains a fraud detector through supervised contrastive learning, and derives separable representations. We empirically evaluate our CLFD framework and other state-of-the-art baselines on benchmark datasets. Our CLFD framework demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines.

Medical image segmentation tasks hitherto have achieved excellent progresses with large-scale datasets, which empowers us to train potent deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). However, labeling such large-scale datasets is laborious and error-prone, which leads the noisy (or incorrect) labels to be an ubiquitous problem in the real-world scenarios. In addition, data collected from different sites usually exhibit significant data distribution shift (or domain shift). As a result, noisy label and domain shift become two common problems in medical imaging application scenarios, especially in medical image segmentation, which degrade the performance of deep learning models significantly. In this paper, we identify a novel problem hidden in medical image segmentation, which is unsupervised domain adaptation on noisy labeled data, and propose a novel algorithm named "Self-Cleansing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation" (S-CDUA) to address such issue. S-CUDA sets up a realistic scenario to solve the above problems simultaneously where training data (i.e., source domain) not only shows domain shift w.r.t. unsupervised test data (i.e., target domain) but also contains noisy labels. The key idea of S-CUDA is to learn noise-excluding and domain invariant knowledge from noisy supervised data, which will be applied on the highly corrupted data for label cleansing and further data-recycling, as well as on the test data with domain shift for supervised propagation. To this end, we propose a novel framework leveraging noisy-label learning and domain adaptation techniques to cleanse the noisy labels and learn from trustable clean samples, thus enabling robust adaptation and prediction on the target domain. Specifically, we train two peer adversarial networks to identify high-confidence clean data and exchange them in companions to eliminate the error accumulation problem and narrow the domain gap simultaneously. In the meantime, the high-confidence noisy data are detected and cleansed in order to reuse the contaminated training data. Therefore, our proposed method can not only cleanse the noisy labels in the training set but also take full advantage of the existing noisy data to update the parameters of the network. For evaluation, we conduct experiments on two popular datasets (REFUGE and Drishti-GS) for optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) segmentation, and on another public multi-vendor dataset for spinal cord gray matter (SCGM) segmentation. Experimental results show that our proposed method can cleanse noisy labels efficiently and obtain a model with better generalization performance at the same time, which outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by large margin. Our code can be found at https://github.com/zzdxjtu/S-cuda.

Urban Water Systems (UWSs) across the world are under mounting pressure as cities continue to expand, infrastructures age, and climate change introduces new levels of uncertainty into water availability and distribution. The traditional tools and hydraulic models that once guided urban water management are increasingly unable to cope with the highly dynamic, non-linear behavior of today's networks. These limitations have prompted a shift toward more adaptive and intelligent approaches capable of handling complex data environments. This review explores how Machine Learning (ML) is emerging as a powerful instrument for addressing these modern challenges. By examining research published largely in the past five years, the paper provides a structured overview of how ML has been applied to major UWS functions— such as forecasting future water demand, identifying leaks and pipe failures, monitoring water quality, and optimizing day-to-day system operations. A diverse range of techniques is discussed, from established learning models like Random Forests (RF) and Support Vector Machines (SVM), to more sophisticated deep learning methods including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Across multiple studies, ML consistently surpasses traditional modelling approaches by learning intricate spatial and temporal relationships that conventional tools fail to capture. Certain algorithms have demonstrated notable advantages—for example, LSTM networks excel in predicting time-dependent water usage, while CNNs show strong performance in analyzing acoustic signals for leak detection. Beyond summarizing existing applications, the review highlights emerging themes and persistent gaps. Key concerns include the uneven availability and reliability of operational datasets, growing demands for data privacy and cybersecurity, and the ongoing challenge of interpreting decisions made by complex deep learning models. Additionally, hybrid frameworks, which combine the strengths of data-driven ML models with physically-based hydraulic models, are gaining interest as a promising direction for future research. Ultimately, the paper emphasizes the need for UWSs to evolve towards intelligent, autonomous, and sustainable systems. By integrating ML into standard practice—supported by robust data collection, careful preprocessing, and informed model selection—urban areas can significantly improve resource allocation, reduce water loss, and enhance overall resilience. This study demonstrates how data-driven strategies, when aligned with the realities of urban infrastructure, can play a pivotal role in shaping the next generation of efficient and sustainable urban water management.

In recent years, state-of-the-art face recognition performance has improved by using deep convolutional neural networks. One disadvantage of these methods is their need for very large, labeled training datasets as collecting and labeling them can be time consuming and prone to error. In this work we examine the robustness of a convolutional neural network to limited training data and training data with noisy labels. We train face recognition networks with varying training set sizes and varying amounts of mislabeled samples. Our experiments show data fidelity is significantly more important than training set size; decreasing the percentage of correctly labeled samples by ten is approximately equivalent to halving the number of training samples.

Noisy labels seriously degrade the performance of the deep learning models. Especially on segmentation tasks, labels are represented at pixel level, and therefore, it is easier to generate them as noisy labels. In this letter, we aim to cleanse the dataset which contains noisy labels using Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence algorithm and noise robust loss function. Here, we regard the whole dataset as noisy labels and separate noisy labels into two different parts. One is the strong noisy labels where there are the most noisy labels, which is referred to as incorrect labels, and the other is The weak noisy labels where pixels are incorrect in some parts of the image. The KL algorithm is more efficient in removing the labels which contain the most noise. At the same time, we use noise robust model to remove the labels where pixels are inaccurate only in small parts of the image. Noise robust loss function is robust to noisy labels, and thus, we consider noisy labels when intersection over union (IoU) is lower than a constant threshold despite using noise robust loss function. The effectiveness of our proposed method is assessed using Kaggle’s TGS Salt Identification Challenge dataset. We have demonstrated that using our method, segmentation performance is increased without heavy noisy labels.

COVID-19 is highly infectious and causes acute respiratory disease. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models are vital in detecting disease from computerized chest tomography (CT) scans. The DL models outperformed the ML models. For COVID-19 detection from CT scan images, DL models are used as end-to-end models. Thus, the performance of the model is evaluated for the quality of the extracted feature and classification accuracy. There are four contributions included in this work. First, this research is motivated by studying the quality of the extracted feature from the DL by feeding these extracted to an ML model. In other words, we proposed comparing the end-to-end DL model performance against the approach of using DL for feature extraction and ML for the classification of COVID-19 CT scan images. Second, we proposed studying the effect of fusing extracted features from image descriptors, e.g., Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), with extracted features from DL models. Third, we proposed a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to be trained from scratch and then compared to the deep transfer learning on the same classification problem. Finally, we studied the performance gap between classic ML models against ensemble learning models. The proposed framework is evaluated using a CT dataset, where the obtained results are evaluated using five different metrics The obtained results revealed that using the proposed CNN model is better than using the well-known DL model for the purpose of feature extraction. Moreover, using a DL model for feature extraction and an ML model for the classification task achieved better results in comparison to using an end-to-end DL model for detecting COVID-19 CT scan images. Of note, the accuracy rate of the former method improved by using ensemble learning models instead of the classic ML models. The proposed method achieved the best accuracy rate of 99.39%.

What's New in Spine Surgery.

Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning, hierarchical learning, or deep machine learning) is a branch of machine learning based on a set of algorithms that attempt to model high-level abstractions in data by using a deep graph with multiple processing layers, composed of multiple linear and nonlinear transformations. Deep learning has been characterized as a class of machine learning algorithms with the following characteristics [257]: • They use a cascade of many layers of nonlinear processing units for feature extraction and transformation. Each successive layer uses the output from the previous layer as input. The algorithms may be supervised or unsupervised and applications include pattern analysis (unsupervised) and classification (supervised). • They are based on the (unsupervised) learning of multiple levels of features or representations of the data. Higher-level features are derived from lower-level features to form a hierarchical representation. • They are part of the broader machine learning field of learning representations of data. • They learn multiple levels of representations that correspond to different levels of abstraction; the levels form a hierarchy of concepts. These definitions have in common: multiple layers of nonlinear processing units and the supervised or unsupervised learning of feature representations in each layer, with the layers forming a hierarchy from low-level to high-level features. Various deep learning architectures such as deep neural networks, convolutional deep neural networks, deep belief networks (DBN), and recurrent neural networks have been applied to fields like computer vision, automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, audio recognition, and bioinformatics where they have been shown to produce state-of-the-art results on various tasks. In this chapter we start in Section 7.1 with an introduction, giving a brief history of this field, the relevant literature, and its applications. Then we study some basic concepts of deep learning such as convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, backpropagation algorithm, restricted Boltzmann machines, and deep learning networks in Section 7.2. Then we illustrate three examples for Apache Spark implementation for mobile big data (MBD), user moving pattern extraction, and combination with nonparametric Bayesian learning, respectively, in Sections 7.3 through 7.5. Finally, we have summary in Section 7.6.

The use of machine learning (ML) has been increasing rapidly in the medical imaging field, including computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), radiomics, and medical image analysis. Recently, an ML area called deep learning emerged in the computer vision field and became very popular in many fields. It started from an event in late 2012, when a deep-learning approach based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) won an overwhelming victory in the best-known worldwide computer vision competition, ImageNet Classification. Since then, researchers in virtually all fields, including medical imaging, have started actively participating in the explosively growing field of deep learning. In this paper, the area of deep learning in medical imaging is overviewed, including (1) what was changed in machine learning before and after the introduction of deep learning, (2) what is the source of the power of deep learning, (3) two major deep-learning models: a massive-training artificial neural network (MTANN) and a convolutional neural network (CNN), (4) similarities and differences between the two models, and (5) their applications to medical imaging. This review shows that ML with feature input (or feature-based ML) was dominant before the introduction of deep learning, and that the major and essential difference between ML before and after deep learning is the learning of image data directly without object segmentation or feature extraction; thus, it is the source of the power of deep learning, although the depth of the model is an important attribute. The class of ML with image input (or image-based ML) including deep learning has a long history, but recently gained popularity due to the use of the new terminology, deep learning. There are two major models in this class of ML in medical imaging, MTANN and CNN, which have similarities as well as several differences. In our experience, MTANNs were substantially more efficient in their development, had a higher performance, and required a lesser number of training cases than did CNNs. "Deep learning", or ML with image input, in medical imaging is an explosively growing, promising field. It is expected that ML with image input will be the mainstream area in the field of medical imaging in the next few decades.

Human motion capture data has been widely used in data-driven character animation. In order to generate realistic, natural-looking motions, most data-driven approaches require considerable efforts of pre-processing, including motion segmentation and annotation. Existing (semi-) automatic solutions either require hand-crafted features for motion segmentation or do not produce the semantic annotations required for motion synthesis and building large-scale motion databases. In addition, human labeled annotation data suffers from inter- and intra-labeler inconsistencies by design. We propose a semi-automatic framework for semantic segmentation of motion capture data based on supervised machine learning techniques. It first transforms a motion capture sequence into a ``motion image'' and applies a convolutional neural network for image segmentation. Dilated temporal convolutions enable the extraction of temporal information from a large receptive field. Our model outperforms two state-of-the-art models for action segmentation, as well as a popular network for sequence modeling. Most of all, our method is very robust under noisy and inaccurate training labels and thus can handle human errors during the labeling process.

Leveraging weak or noisy supervision for building effective machine learning models has long been an important research problem. Its importance has further increased recently due to the growing need for large-scale datasets to train deep learning models. Weak or noisy supervision could originate from multiple sources including non-expert annotators or automatic labeling based on heuristics or user interaction signals. There is an extensive amount of previous work focusing on leveraging noisy labels. Most notably, recent work has shown impressive gains by using a meta-learned instance re-weighting approach where a meta-learning framework is used to assign instance weights to noisy labels. In this paper, we extend this approach via posing the problem as a label correction problem within a meta-learning framework. We view the label correction procedure as a meta-process and propose a new meta-learning based framework termed MLC (Meta Label Correction) for learning with noisy labels. Specifically, a label correction network is adopted as a meta-model to produce corrected labels for noisy labels while the main model is trained to leverage the corrected labels. Both models are jointly trained by solving a bi-level optimization problem. We run extensive experiments with different label noise levels and types on both image recognition and text classification tasks. We compare the re-weighing and correction approaches showing that the correction framing addresses some of the limitations of re-weighting. We also show that the proposed MLC approach outperforms previous methods in both image and language tasks.

Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) calls are prone to various speech impairments due to environmental and network conditions resulting in bad user experience. A reliable audio impairment classifier helps to identify the cause for bad audio quality. The user feedback after the call can act as the ground truth labels for training a supervised classifier on a large audio dataset. However, the labels are noisy as most of the users lack the expertise to precisely articulate the impairment in the perceived speech. In this paper, we analyze the effects of massive noise in labels in training dense networks and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) using engineered features, spectrograms and raw audio samples as inputs. We demonstrate that CNN can generalize better on the training data with a large number of noisy labels and gives remarkably higher test performance. The classifiers were trained both on randomly generated label noise and the label noise introduced by human errors. We also show that training with noisy labels requires a significant increase in the training dataset size, which is in proportion to the amount of noise in the labels.

The prevalence of mobile sensors makes it possible for researchers to collect and analyze the pervasive sensed human activity data with machine learning tools. These analyses and applications heavily rely on the self-report survey data that reflect human physical and psychological behaviors. However, many factors can affect the reliability of such self-report surveys, such as participants' trusty and ambiguous descriptions in questionnaires. These inaccurate survey labels challenge the development of the models, especially when it comes to the case where deep learning approaches tend to memorize the noisy information from training data. In this paper, we set out to deal with the noisy self-report survey labels. We aim to address the following challenges: 1)the limited access to clean labeled data in real-world scenarios; 2)different noise ratio of the data from different participants; 3)various types of noise that appear in the data; 4)how to evaluate the reliability of participants. As such, we propose a generalizable model, Lan, for learning from multi-modal sensory data and noisy labels. The proposed model incorporates the temporal information from sensory data to guide the model training and thus to augment noise tolerance. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset were conducted to show our model outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks.

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made great achievements in object extraction from very high-resolution (VHR) images. However, most existing approaches require large quantities of clean and accurate training data to achieve impressive classification results. The presence of inaccurate labels in training datasets is known to deteriorate the performance of CNNs. In this paper, we introduce a novel efficient method for improving the robustness when training CNN on the dataset with relatively noisy labels. First, we propose a feature and label noise model (FLNM) to model the noisy label distribution in the training dataset. Then, we use a multitask deep learning framework (MDLF) to integrate the FLNM into the training process of CNN. Finally, a novel loss function concerning the high-level features is introduced to efficiently train the MDLF. We evaluate our method on datasets from Massachusetts and compare this method with other state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving the classification performance of CNNs trained with noisy training dataset.

Daily scale streamflow forecasting in multiple stream orders of Cauvery River, India: Application of advanced ensemble and deep learning models