Revisiting Learning with Noisy Labels: Active Forgetting and Noise Suppression

Abstract

Learning with noisy labels (LNL) has received growing attention, with most prior work following the paradigm of clean-sample reliance (e.g., sample selection). However, this reliance also imposes intrinsic limitations, as overfitting to even a few noisy samples is inevitable, creating a major bottleneck for further improvement. This limitation motivates us to go beyond mere clean-sample reliance and explore how to actively forget corrupted knowledge already internalized by models while suppressing further noise assimilation. To this end, we propose FINE, a fundamentally novel perspective for LNL that unifies active ForgettIng via machine unlearning (MU) and Noise supprEssion via negative learning (NL) within a cohesive framework. Specifically, we first reveal two key stages of noise fitting: early-stage generalized learning and later-stage noise overfitting. To actively forget early-stage noise accumulation, we introduce an MU-based module that employs a negative cross-entropy loss to erase corrupted knowledge, while an NL-based module leveraging complementary labels suppresses later-stage overfitting and mitigates reliance on noisy supervision. These modules act synergistically as plug-and-play regularizers, seamlessly integrating into existing baselines. Finally, extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world noisy benchmarks demonstrate that our FINE consistently boosts robustness and generalization.