In online shopping applications, the daily insertion of new products requires an overwhelming annotation effort. Usually done by humans, it comes at a huge cost and yet generates high rates of noisy/missing labels that seriously hinder the effectiveness of CNNs in multi-label classification. We propose SELF-ML, a classification framework that exploits the relation between visual attributes and appearance together with the “low-rank” nature of the feature space. It learns a sparse reconstruction of image features as a convex combination of very few images – a basis – that are correctly annotated. Building on this representation, SELF-ML has a module that relabels noisy annotations from the derived combination of the clean data. Due to such structured reconstruction, SELF-ML gives an explanation of its label-flipping decisions. Experiments on a real-world shopping dataset show that SELF-ML significantly increases the number of correct labels even with few clean annotations.
