Is the Information Bottleneck Robust Enough? Towards Label-Noise Resistant Information Bottleneck Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Huang, Yi, Sun, Qingyun, Gao, Yisen, Yuan, Haonan, Fu, Xingcheng, Li, Jianxin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Huang, Yi
Sun, Qingyun
Gao, Yisen
Yuan, Haonan
Fu, Xingcheng
Li, Jianxin
author_facet Huang, Yi
Sun, Qingyun
Gao, Yisen
Yuan, Haonan
Fu, Xingcheng
Li, Jianxin
contents The Information Bottleneck (IB) principle facilitates effective representation learning by preserving label-relevant information while compressing irrelevant information. However, its strong reliance on accurate labels makes it inherently vulnerable to label noise, prevalent in real-world scenarios, resulting in significant performance degradation and overfitting. To address this issue, we propose LaT-IB, a novel Label-Noise ResistanT Information Bottleneck method which introduces a "Minimal-Sufficient-Clean" (MSC) criterion. Instantiated as a mutual information regularizer to retain task-relevant information while discarding noise, MSC addresses standard IB's vulnerability to noisy label supervision. To achieve this, LaT-IB employs a noise-aware latent disentanglement that decomposes the latent representation into components aligned with to the clean label space and the noise space. Theoretically, we first derive mutual information bounds for each component of our objective including prediction, compression, and disentanglement, and moreover prove that optimizing it encourages representations invariant to input noise and separates clean and noisy label information. Furthermore, we design a three-phase training framework: Warmup, Knowledge Injection and Robust Training, to progressively guide the model toward noise-resistant representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LaT-IB achieves superior robustness and efficiency under label noise, significantly enhancing robustness and applicability in real-world scenarios with label noise.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_10573
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is the Information Bottleneck Robust Enough? Towards Label-Noise Resistant Information Bottleneck Learning
Huang, Yi
Sun, Qingyun
Gao, Yisen
Yuan, Haonan
Fu, Xingcheng
Li, Jianxin
Machine Learning
The Information Bottleneck (IB) principle facilitates effective representation learning by preserving label-relevant information while compressing irrelevant information. However, its strong reliance on accurate labels makes it inherently vulnerable to label noise, prevalent in real-world scenarios, resulting in significant performance degradation and overfitting. To address this issue, we propose LaT-IB, a novel Label-Noise ResistanT Information Bottleneck method which introduces a "Minimal-Sufficient-Clean" (MSC) criterion. Instantiated as a mutual information regularizer to retain task-relevant information while discarding noise, MSC addresses standard IB's vulnerability to noisy label supervision. To achieve this, LaT-IB employs a noise-aware latent disentanglement that decomposes the latent representation into components aligned with to the clean label space and the noise space. Theoretically, we first derive mutual information bounds for each component of our objective including prediction, compression, and disentanglement, and moreover prove that optimizing it encourages representations invariant to input noise and separates clean and noisy label information. Furthermore, we design a three-phase training framework: Warmup, Knowledge Injection and Robust Training, to progressively guide the model toward noise-resistant representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LaT-IB achieves superior robustness and efficiency under label noise, significantly enhancing robustness and applicability in real-world scenarios with label noise.
title Is the Information Bottleneck Robust Enough? Towards Label-Noise Resistant Information Bottleneck Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10573