Bridging Weakly-Supervised Learning and VLM Distillation: Noisy Partial Label Learning for Efficient Downstream Adaptation

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Main Authors: Wang, Qian-Wei, Song, Yaguang, Xia, Shu-Tao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Qian-Wei
Song, Yaguang
Xia, Shu-Tao
author_facet Wang, Qian-Wei
Song, Yaguang
Xia, Shu-Tao
contents In the context of noisy partial label learning (NPLL), each training sample is associated with a set of candidate labels annotated by multiple noisy annotators. With the emergence of high-performance pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP, LLaVA, and GPT-4V, leveraging these models to replace time-consuming manual annotation and enable annotation-free training has become a promising research direction. This paper studies learning from noisy partial labels generated by pre-trained VLMs and proposes a collaborative consistency regularization (Co-Reg) framework. Unlike symmetric noise commonly assumed in traditional noisy label learning, VLM-generated noise is instance-dependent and reflects the intrinsic biases of pre-trained models, posing greater challenges. To address this issue, we jointly train two neural networks to perform collaborative label purification via a co-pseudo-labeling mechanism, while enforcing consistency regularization in both label and feature representation spaces. In addition, multiple anti-overfitting strategies are introduced, including alternating optimization of contrastive representations and pseudo-labels, as well as maintaining class prototypes in a shared feature space. The proposed method can further incorporate few-shot manually annotated labels for performance enhancement. Extensive experiments under various settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and highlight the potential of integrating weakly supervised learning into the knowledge distillation of pre-trained models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03229
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging Weakly-Supervised Learning and VLM Distillation: Noisy Partial Label Learning for Efficient Downstream Adaptation
Wang, Qian-Wei
Song, Yaguang
Xia, Shu-Tao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
In the context of noisy partial label learning (NPLL), each training sample is associated with a set of candidate labels annotated by multiple noisy annotators. With the emergence of high-performance pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP, LLaVA, and GPT-4V, leveraging these models to replace time-consuming manual annotation and enable annotation-free training has become a promising research direction. This paper studies learning from noisy partial labels generated by pre-trained VLMs and proposes a collaborative consistency regularization (Co-Reg) framework. Unlike symmetric noise commonly assumed in traditional noisy label learning, VLM-generated noise is instance-dependent and reflects the intrinsic biases of pre-trained models, posing greater challenges. To address this issue, we jointly train two neural networks to perform collaborative label purification via a co-pseudo-labeling mechanism, while enforcing consistency regularization in both label and feature representation spaces. In addition, multiple anti-overfitting strategies are introduced, including alternating optimization of contrastive representations and pseudo-labels, as well as maintaining class prototypes in a shared feature space. The proposed method can further incorporate few-shot manually annotated labels for performance enhancement. Extensive experiments under various settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and highlight the potential of integrating weakly supervised learning into the knowledge distillation of pre-trained models.
title Bridging Weakly-Supervised Learning and VLM Distillation: Noisy Partial Label Learning for Efficient Downstream Adaptation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03229