A Unified Open Adapter for Open-World Noisy Label Learning: Data-Centric and Learning-Based Insights

Noisy label learning (NLL) in open-world scenarios poses a novel challenge due to the presence of noisy data from both known and unknown classes. Most existing methods operate under the closed-set assumption, rendering them vulnerable to open-set noise, which significantly degrades their performance. While some approaches attempt to mitigate the impact of open-set examples, they struggle to learn effective discriminative representations for them, leading to unsatisfactory recognition performance. To address these issues, we propose a unified Open Adapter (OpenAda) that identifies open-set noise from both data-centric and learning-based perspectives, and can be easily integrated into mainstream NLL methods to improve their performance and robustness. Specifically, the data-centric part leverages label clusterability to sequentially identify basic clean and basic open-set examples both with high neighbor agreement. The learning-based part integrates one-vs-all classifiers with a progressive open disambiguation strategy to learn a reliable “inlier vs. outlier” boundary for each class. This enables the model to detect challenging open-set examples that partially overlap in the representation space with closed-set ones. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the superiority of our approach. Notably, with minor modifications, DivideMix with OpenAda achieves performance improvements of 9.31% and 18.26% on the open-world CIFAR-80 dataset under 80% symmetric noise and 40% asymmetric noise. The code is available at https://github.com/chenchenzong/OpenAda.