Leveraging Dissimilarity Invariance as a Robust Anchor for Learning with Noisy Labels

Abstract Deep learning models excel in visual recognition but suffer severe performance drops when training labels are corrupted by noise. Under label noise prior work cannot learn accurate similarities and thus misguide the learning process. In this paper, we uncover a complementary and novel phenomenon, Dissimilarity Invariance, whereby semantic dissimilarity between unrelated samples remains stable despite label noise. Leveraging this insight, we propose NegScale, a plug-and-play framework that shifts focus from fragile similarity to robust dissimilarity. NegScale integrates: (1) Structured Negative Orthogonality Penalty (SNOP), enforcing subspace orthogonality for unrelated samples; and (2) Dissimilarity-Calibrated Similarity Adjustment (DCSA), suppressing spurious similarity using dissimilarity anchors. We also give theoretical analysis that proves Dissimilarity Invariance and the effectiveness of NegScale. Empirical results demonstrate that NegScale consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, establishing new benchmarks on CIFAR with synthetic noise and real-world datasets.