Label smoothing is commonly used in training deep learning models, wherein one-hot training labels are mixed with uniform label vectors. Empirically, smoothing has been shown to improve both predictive performance and model calibration. In this paper, we study whether label smoothing is also effective as a means of coping with label noise. While label smoothing apparently amplifies this problem --- being equivalent to injecting symmetric noise to the labels --- we show how it relates to a general family of loss-correction techniques from the label noise literature. Building on this connection, we show that label smoothing is competitive with loss-correction under label noise. Further, we show that when distilling models from noisy data, label smoothing of the teacher is beneficial; this is in contrast to recent findings for noise-free problems, and sheds further light on settings where label smoothing is beneficial.

本文通过研究标签平滑是否能够缓解标签噪声的影响，发现标签平滑可以与标签噪声文献中的一类损失校正技术相竞争，同时发现在从嘈杂数据中提取模型时，对老师标签进行标签平滑可以提高模型性能，这对于噪声无关问题的最近发现提供了进一步的启示，说明标签平滑在某些情况下是有益的。

标签平滑是否缓解标签噪声？