Meta-Guided Sample Reweighting for Robust Cross-Modal Hashing Retrieval with Noisy Labels

Abstract

Cross-modal hashing (CMH) is an effective tool for large-scale retrieval due to its low storage cost and high efficiency. However, real-world multi-modal datasets often contain noisy annotations, which can significantly impair model performance. Many existing methods address this issue by using the small-loss criterion to select a likely clean subset of data to guide model training. Nonetheless, this clean subset is typically dominated by easy samples, and treating all samples within it equally can undermine the model’s generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning-based framework, named Meta-Guided Sample Reweighting for Cross-Modal Hashing Retrieval (MGSH), which integrates meta-learning into robust cross-modal hashing. To address the above issues, we design a Meta-Similarity Weighting Network (MSWN) that dynamically assigns importance weights to samples during training. By employing a bi-level optimization strategy, the meta-importance weights are used to scale the loss of training samples during the main network update, encouraging the model to focus on more challenging examples. Additionally, to further distinguish between noisy and clean samples, we incorporate adaptive-margin and meta-guided center aggregation into a robust hashing loss, both guided by the learned meta-importance weights. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that MGSH consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness.