Jump-teaching: Combating Sample Selection Bias via Temporal Disagreement

Abstract Sample selection is a straightforward technique to combat noisy labels, aiming to prevent mislabeled samples from degrading the robustness of neural networks. However, existing methods mitigate compounding selection bias either by leveraging dual-network disagreement or additional forward propagations, leading to multiplied training overhead. To address this challenge, we introduce Jump-teaching, an efficient sample selection framework for debiased model update and simplified selection criterion. Based on a key observation that a neural network exhibits significant disagreement across different training iterations, Jump-teaching proposes a jump-manner model update strategy to enable self-correction of selection bias by harnessing temporal disagreement, eliminating the need for multi-network or multi-round training. Furthermore, we employ a sample-wise selection criterion building on the intra variance of a decomposed single loss for a fine-grained selection without relying on batch-wise ranking or dataset-wise modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Jump-teaching outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts while achieving a nearly overhead-free selection procedure, which boosts training speed by up to 4.47× and reduces peak memory footprint by 54%.