Guest Editorial: Learning From Noisy Multimedia Data

This special issue provides a premier forum for researchers in multimedia big data to share challenges and recent advancements in learning from noisy multimedia data. The multimedia age and its proliferation of devices and platforms is fueling exponential data growth. As computational power and deep learning algorithms rapidly evolve, the web has become a rich source of potential training data for robust machine learning, with search engines such as Google and Bing, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and short video sharing platforms offering large-scale data points in the hundreds of millions. The concurrent shift in the Internet to richer web data modalities such as text, audio, image, and video reveal further opportunities to leverage large-scale data for the automatic construction of a variety of datasets for model training and testing. However, the ubiquity of multimedia data means noise is a fundamental challenge, with ‘label noise’ and ‘domain mismatch’ the most critical issues in automatically collected datasets. Learning from noisy multimedia data tends towards poor performance, making it increasingly essential to address these challenges.