In plain words: A study checked the test sets of 10 vision, text, and audio datasets for wrong labels, using a scoring tool followed by human checks. At least 3.3% of labels were wrong on average, and fixing them can flip rankings so smaller models beat bigger ones.
Abstract · Pervasive Label Errors in Test Sets Destabilize Machine Learning Benchmarks
We identify label errors in the test sets of 10 of the most commonly-used computer vision, natural language, and audio datasets, and subsequently study the potential for these label errors to affect benchmark results. Errors in test sets are numerous and widespread: we estimate an average of at least 3.3% errors across the 10 datasets, where for example label errors comprise at least 6% of the ImageNet validation set. Putative label errors are identified using confident learning algorithms and then human-validated via crowdsourcing (51% of the algorithmically-flagged candidates are indeed erroneously labeled, on average across the datasets). Traditionally, machine learning practitioners choose which model to deploy based on test accuracy - our findings advise caution here, proposing that judging models over correctly labeled test sets may be more useful, especially for noisy real-world datasets. Surprisingly, we find that lower capacity models may be practically more useful than higher capacity models in real-world datasets with high proportions of erroneously labeled data. For example, on ImageNet with corrected labels: ResNet-18 outperforms ResNet-50 if the prevalence of originally mislabeled test examples increases by just 6%. On CIFAR-10 with corrected labels: VGG-11 outperforms VGG-19 if the prevalence of originally mislabeled test examples increases by just 5%. Test set errors across the 10 datasets can be viewed at https://labelerrors.com and all label errors can be reproduced by https://github.com/cleanlab/label-errors.
Curtis G. Northcutt, Anish Athalye, Jonas Mueller
arXiv:2103.14749 · stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Mar 26, 2021 · updated Nov 7, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · Demo available at https://labelerrors.com/ and source code available at https://github.com/cleanlab/label-errors
[0] https://github.com/pytorch/vision/issues/1439