A Self-Denoising Model for Robust Few-Shot Relation Extraction

Liang Zhang, Yang Zhang, Ziyao Lu, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Jinsong Su


Abstract
The few-shot relation extraction (FSRE) aims at enhancing the model’s generalization to new relations with very few labeled instances (support instances). Most existing studies use prototype networks (ProtoNets) for FSRE and assume that the support set, adapting the model to new relations, only contains accurately labeled instances. However, this assumption is usually unrealistic, as even carefully-annotated datasets often contain mislabeled instances. Thus, it is essential to enhance the robustness of FSRE models to noisy labels in support set, but this issue remains unexplored. In this paper, we first conduct a preliminary study, revealing the high sensitivity of ProtoNets to such noisy labels. Meanwhile, we discover that fully leveraging mislabeled support instances is crucial for enhancing the model’s robustness. To do this, we propose a self-denoising model for FSRE, which can automatically correct noisy labels of support instances. Specifically, our model comprises two core components: 1) a label correction module (LCM), used to correct mislabeled support instances based on the distances between them in the embedding space, and 2) a relation classification module (RCM), designed to achieve more robust relation prediction using the corrected labels generated by the LCM. Moreover, we propose a feedback-based training strategy, which focuses on training LCM and RCM to synergistically handle noisy labels in support set. Experimental results on two public datasets show the effectiveness and robustness of our model. Notably, even in scenarios without noisy labels, our model significantly outperforms all competitive baselines.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.1299
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
26782–26797
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1299/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liang Zhang, Yang Zhang, Ziyao Lu, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, and Jinsong Su. 2025. A Self-Denoising Model for Robust Few-Shot Relation Extraction. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 26782–26797, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Self-Denoising Model for Robust Few-Shot Relation Extraction (Zhang et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1299.pdf