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Rank consistent ordinal regression for neural networks with application to age estimation

arXiv 1901.07884 ↗First posted 20 Jan 2019cs.LG stat.MLcited by 132

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Abstract (arXiv)

In many real-world prediction tasks, class labels include information about the relative ordering between labels, which is not captured by commonly-used loss functions such as multi-category cross-entropy. Recently, the deep learning community adopted ordinal regression frameworks to take such ordering information into account. Neural networks were equipped with ordinal regression capabilities by transforming ordinal targets into binary classification subtasks. However, this method suffers from inconsistencies among the different binary classifiers. To resolve these inconsistencies, we propose the COnsistent RAnk Logits (CORAL) framework with strong theoretical guarantees for rank-monotonicity and consistent confidence scores. Moreover, the proposed method is architecture-agnostic and can extend arbitrary state-of-the-art deep neural network classifiers for ordinal regression tasks. The empirical evaluation of the proposed rank-consistent method on a range of face-image datasets for age prediction shows a substantial reduction of the prediction error compared to the reference ordinal regression network.

Key facts. Cited by 132 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2019.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 8; 2022: 15; 2023: 13; 2024: 23; 2025: 31; 2026: 42.

132 papers.

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  1. 2022Rank-N-Contrast: Learning Continuous Representations for Regressioncited by 74
  2. 2021Deep Neural Networks for Rank-Consistent Ordinal Regression Based On Conditional Probabilitiescited by 57
  3. 2023MiVOLO: Multi-input Transformer for Age and Gender Estimationcited by 41
  4. 2023Deep networks for system identification: a Surveycited by 35
  5. 2024FaceXFormer: A Unified Transformer for Facial Analysiscited by 34
  6. 2023Masked Contrastive Graph Representation Learning for Age Estimationcited by 27
  7. 2025FaceXBench: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs on Face Understandingcited by 23
  8. 2021FP-Age: Leveraging Face Parsing Attention for Facial Age Estimation in the Wildcited by 20
  9. 2023A Call to Reflect on Evaluation Practices for Age Estimation: Comparative Analysis of the State-of-the-Art and a Unified Benchmarkcited by 19
  10. 2021LARGE: Latent-Based Regression through GAN Semanticscited by 17
  11. 2022Class Distance Weighted Cross-Entropy Loss for Ulcerative Colitis Severity Estimationcited by 17
  12. 2022ZigZag: Universal Sampling-free Uncertainty Estimation Through Two-Step Inferencecited by 15
38 more
  1. 2023CILF-CIAE: CLIP-driven Image-Language Fusion for Correcting Inverse Age Estimationcited by 15
  2. 2021Improving Face-Based Age Estimation with Attention-Based Dynamic Patch Fusioncited by 13
  3. 2023Multimodal Subtask Graph Generation from Instructional Videoscited by 13
  4. 2023Unsupervised Contrast-Consistent Ranking with Language Modelscited by 13
  5. 2024Faceptor: A Generalist Model for Face Perceptioncited by 12
  6. 2025Face-Human-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Face and Human Understanding for Multi-modal Assistantscited by 12
  7. 2022Improving the repeatability of deep learning models with Monte Carlo dropoutcited by 11
  8. 2023Coarse-to-Fine Multi-Scene Pose Regression with Transformerscited by 11
  9. 2024Face-MLLM: A Large Face Perception Modelcited by 11
  10. 2025Decoding-based Regressioncited by 11
  11. 2024Beyond Specialization: Assessing the Capabilities of MLLMs in Age and Gender Estimationcited by 9
  12. 2021Hierarchical Attention-based Age Estimation and Bias Estimationcited by 7
  13. 2023TAA-GCN: A Temporally Aware Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network for Age Estimationcited by 7
  14. 2023Discretization-Induced Dirichlet Posterior for Robust Uncertainty Quantification on Regressioncited by 7
  15. 2024Disease-informed Adaptation of Vision-Language Modelscited by 7
  16. 2024Ordinal Multiple-instance Learning for Ulcerative Colitis Severity Estimation with Selective Aggregated Transformercited by 7
  17. 2024Class Distance Weighted Cross Entropy Loss for Classification of Disease Severitycited by 7
  18. 2021Pairwise Fairness for Ordinal Regressioncited by 6
  19. 2024IT3: Idempotent Test-Time Trainingcited by 6
  20. 2025FaVChat: Hierarchical Prompt-Query Guided Facial Video Understanding with Data-Efficient GRPOcited by 6
  21. 2022BLUE at Memotion 2.0 2022: You have my Image, my Text and my Transformercited by 5
  22. 2022Ordinal-ResLogit: Interpretable Deep Residual Neural Networks for Ordered Choicescited by 5
  23. 2022Detecting Mitoses with a Convolutional Neural Network for MIDOG 2022 Challengecited by 5
  24. 2022Label Encoding for Regression Networkscited by 5
  25. 2026Out of the box age estimation through facial imagery: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Vision-Language Models vs. out-of-the-box Traditional Architecturescited by 5
  26. 2024Learning semantic image quality for fetal ultrasound from noisy ranking annotationcited by 4
  27. 2024Parallel Algorithm for Optimal Threshold Labeling of Ordinal Regression Methodscited by 4
  28. 2024Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Demographic Inference with Large Multimodal Modelscited by 4
  29. 2024ADSNet: Cross-Domain LTV Prediction with an Adaptive Siamese Network in Advertisingcited by 4
  30. 2025Ordinal Label-Distribution Learning with Constrained Asymmetric Priors for Imbalanced Retinal Gradingcited by 4
  31. 2021Universally Rank Consistent Ordinal Regression in Neural Networkscited by 3
  32. 2024Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Neighborhoods for Brain Age Prediction on 3D Stiffness Mapscited by 3
  33. 2024Self-supervised Auxiliary Learning for Texture and Model-based Hybrid Robust and Fair Featuring in Face Analysiscited by 3
  34. 2024Ordinal-Aware Calibration for Ordinal Classificationcited by 3
  35. 2024GroupFace: Imbalanced Age Estimation Based on Multi-hop Attention Graph Convolutional Network and Group-aware Margin Optimizationcited by 3
  36. 2025Enhancing Depression Detection via Question-wise Modality Fusioncited by 3
  37. 2022Detecting respiratory motion artefacts for cardiovascular MRIs to ensure high-quality segmentationcited by 2
  38. 2022Gait-based Age Group Classification with Adaptive Graph Neural Networkcited by 2

50 most cited of 132 All 132 (JSON)