LiLAW: Lightweight Learnable Adaptive Weighting to Learn Sample Difficulty & Improve Noisy Training

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Moturu, Abhishek, Muzammil, Muhammad, Goldenberg, Anna, Taati, Babak
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Moturu, Abhishek
Muzammil, Muhammad
Goldenberg, Anna
Taati, Babak
author_facet Moturu, Abhishek
Muzammil, Muhammad
Goldenberg, Anna
Taati, Babak
contents Training deep neural networks with noise and data heterogeneity is a major challenge. We introduce Lightweight Learnable Adaptive Weighting (LiLAW), a method that dynamically adjusts the loss weight of each training sample based on its evolving difficulty, categorized as easy, moderate, and hard, using only three global learnable scalar parameters. LiLAW learns to adaptively prioritize samples by updating these parameters with a single gradient descent step on a validation mini-batch after each training mini-batch, without requiring a clean, unbiased validation set. Experiments across general and medical imaging datasets, several noise types and levels, loss functions, and architectures with and without pretraining, including linear probing and full fine-tuning, show that LiLAW consistently improves accuracy and AUROC, especially in higher-noise settings, without requiring excessive tuning. We also obtain state-of-the-art results incorporating synthetic and augmented data from SynPAIN, GAITGen, ECG5000, and improved fairness on the Adult dataset. LiLAW is lightweight, practical, and computationally efficient, making it an effective, scalable approach to boost generalization and robustness across diverse deep learning training setups, especially in resource-constrained settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_20786
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LiLAW: Lightweight Learnable Adaptive Weighting to Learn Sample Difficulty & Improve Noisy Training
Moturu, Abhishek
Muzammil, Muhammad
Goldenberg, Anna
Taati, Babak
Machine Learning
Training deep neural networks with noise and data heterogeneity is a major challenge. We introduce Lightweight Learnable Adaptive Weighting (LiLAW), a method that dynamically adjusts the loss weight of each training sample based on its evolving difficulty, categorized as easy, moderate, and hard, using only three global learnable scalar parameters. LiLAW learns to adaptively prioritize samples by updating these parameters with a single gradient descent step on a validation mini-batch after each training mini-batch, without requiring a clean, unbiased validation set. Experiments across general and medical imaging datasets, several noise types and levels, loss functions, and architectures with and without pretraining, including linear probing and full fine-tuning, show that LiLAW consistently improves accuracy and AUROC, especially in higher-noise settings, without requiring excessive tuning. We also obtain state-of-the-art results incorporating synthetic and augmented data from SynPAIN, GAITGen, ECG5000, and improved fairness on the Adult dataset. LiLAW is lightweight, practical, and computationally efficient, making it an effective, scalable approach to boost generalization and robustness across diverse deep learning training setups, especially in resource-constrained settings.
title LiLAW: Lightweight Learnable Adaptive Weighting to Learn Sample Difficulty & Improve Noisy Training
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20786