Dual-Granularity Learning for Regression with Continuous Noisy Labels

Hui Guo, Boyu Wang, Grace Y. Yi

Learning with noisy labels has been extensively studied for classification, yet its regression counterpart remains relatively underexplored. Unlike classification, regression involves continuous-valued targets where label noise exhibits heterogeneous magnitudes across instances, which poses conflicting requirements on the model: correcting small-to-moderate deviations requires sensitivity to label values for instance-level refinement, whereas large deviations caused by corrupted or outlying annotations render exact label values unreliable, necessitating reduced reliance on exact labels and instead leveraging ordinal structure among samples. These requirements call for methods that capture both global structure and sample-specific deviations in a unified manner. To this end, we propose GRAIN, a dual-granularity framework for robust noisy regression. At the fine-grained level, we derive an explicit residual learning mechanism from a robust loss formulation, introducing instance-specific auxiliary variables to decouple label noise from predictive signals. At the coarse-grained level, we introduce a binning-based contrastive regularization that enforces an order-preserving feature…