mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

When does dough become a bagel? Analyzing the remaining mistakes on ImageNet

arXiv 2205.04596 ↗First posted 9 May 2022cs.CVcited by 60

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Abstract (arXiv)

Image classification accuracy on the ImageNet dataset has been a barometer for progress in computer vision over the last decade. Several recent papers have questioned the degree to which the benchmark remains useful to the community, yet innovations continue to contribute gains to performance, with today's largest models achieving 90%+ top-1 accuracy. To help contextualize progress on ImageNet and provide a more meaningful evaluation for today's state-of-the-art models, we manually review and categorize every remaining mistake that a few top models make in order to provide insight into the long-tail of errors on one of the most benchmarked datasets in computer vision. We focus on the multi-label subset evaluation of ImageNet, where today's best models achieve upwards of 97% top-1 accuracy. Our analysis reveals that nearly half of the supposed mistakes are not mistakes at all, and we uncover new valid multi-labels, demonstrating that, without careful review, we are significantly underestimating the performance of these models. On the other hand, we also find that today's best models still make a significant number of mistakes (40%) that are obviously wrong to human reviewers. To calibrate future progress on ImageNet, we provide an updated multi-label evaluation set, and we curate ImageNet-Major: a 68-example "major error" slice of the obvious mistakes made by today's top models -- a slice where models should achieve near perfection, but today are far from doing so.

Key facts. Cited by 60 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 39 of its 57 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 May 2022.

Builds on

39 of 57 references.

References · 39

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
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  2. 2017Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Eracited by 916
  3. 2019Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learningcited by 766
  4. 2018Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretrainingcited by 604
  5. 2018Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?cited by 560
  6. 2019Confident Learning: Estimating Uncertainty in Dataset Labelscited by 411
  7. 2021Pervasive Label Errors in Test Sets Destabilize Machine Learning Benchmarkscited by 388
  8. 2020Noise or Signal: The Role of Image Backgrounds in Object Recognitioncited by 342
  9. 2020Are we done with ImageNet?cited by 329
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  13. 2019What Do Compressed Deep Neural Networks Forget?cited by 164
  14. 2022Domino: Discovering Systematic Errors with Cross-Modal Embeddingscited by 155
  15. 2021Re-labeling ImageNet: from Single to Multi-Labels, from Global to Localized Labelscited by 117
  16. 2021Salient ImageNet: How to discover spurious features in Deep Learning?cited by 114
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  19. 2019Lingvo: a Modular and Scalable Framework for Sequence-to-Sequence Modelingcited by 86
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  21. 2021The Evolution of Out-of-Distribution Robustness Throughout Fine-Tuningcited by 74
  22. 2019Do We Train on Test Data? Purging CIFAR of Near-Duplicatescited by 61
  23. 2021No One Representation to Rule Them All: Overlapping Features of Training Methodscited by 57
  24. 2019Model Similarity Mitigates Test Set Overusecited by 37
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 6; 2023: 24; 2024: 14; 2025: 9; 2026: 7.

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  2. 2022Distilling Model Failures as Directions in Latent Spacecited by 82
  3. 2022Human alignment of neural network representationscited by 74
  4. 2023The Song Describer Dataset: a Corpus of Audio Captions for Music-and-Language Evaluationcited by 68
  5. 2022Hyperbolic Contrastive Learning for Visual Representations beyond Objectscited by 58
  6. 2023GeneCIS: A Benchmark for General Conditional Image Similaritycited by 46
  7. 2024VariErr NLI: Separating Annotation Error from Human Label Variationcited by 42
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  9. 2023Analyzing Dataset Annotation Quality Management in the Wildcited by 39
  10. 2023Understanding and Mitigating the Label Noise in Pre-training on Downstream Taskscited by 27
  11. 2022Metadata Archaeology: Unearthing Data Subsets by Leveraging Training Dynamicscited by 26
  12. 2025Fine-Grained Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion-based Foundation Modelscited by 22
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  8. 2024CSA: Data-efficient Mapping of Unimodal Features to Multimodal Featurescited by 10
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  10. 2023PRIME: Prioritizing Interpretability in Failure Mode Extractioncited by 9
  11. 2024Slight Corruption in Pre-training Data Makes Better Diffusion Modelscited by 9
  12. 2023Benchmarking Robustness to Adversarial Image Obfuscationscited by 8
  13. 2024Impact of Noisy Supervision in Foundation Model Learningcited by 8
  14. 2024On Efficient and Statistical Quality Estimation for Data Annotationcited by 8
  15. 2024DISCERN: Decoding Systematic Errors in Natural Language for Text Classifierscited by 8
  16. 2025On Large Multimodal Models as Open-World Image Classifierscited by 8
  17. 2024A comparison between humans and AI at recognizing objects in unusual posescited by 7
  18. 2023Automated Classification of Model Errors on ImageNetcited by 6
  19. 2024LEMoN: Label Error Detection using Multimodal Neighborscited by 6
  20. 2024Selective Learning: Towards Robust Calibration with Dynamic Regularizationcited by 5
  21. 2025Classifier-to-Bias: Toward Unsupervised Automatic Bias Detection for Visual Classifierscited by 4
  22. 2023Label Smarter, Not Harder: CleverLabel for Faster Annotation of Ambiguous Image Classification with Higher Qualitycited by 3
  23. 2023An Empirical Study of Automated Mislabel Detection in Real World Vision Datasetscited by 3
  24. 2025I Am Big, You Are Little; I Am Right, You Are Wrongcited by 3
  25. 2023RK-core: An Established Methodology for Exploring the Hierarchical Structure within Datasetscited by 2
  26. 2024A Benchmark Dataset for Tornado Detection and Prediction using Full-Resolution Polarimetric Weather Radar Datacited by 2
  27. 2024Leveraging Human-Machine Interactions for Computer Vision Dataset Quality Enhancementcited by 2
  28. 2025Image Recognition with Vision and Language Embeddings of VLMscited by 2
  29. 2026Multimodal Large Language Models as Image Classifierscited by 2
  30. 2023Building One-class Detector for Anything: Open-vocabulary Zero-shot OOD Detection Using Text-image Modelscited by 1
  31. 2023Annotating Ambiguous Images: General Annotation Strategy for High-Quality Data with Real-World Biomedical Validationcited by 1
  32. 2024The Impact of the Single-Label Assumption in Image Recognition Benchmarkingcited by 1
  33. 2025Teaching People LLM's Errors and Getting it Rightcited by 1
  34. 2026Context Sensitivity Improves Human-Machine Visual Alignmentcited by 1
  35. 2026Doomed to Re-Annotate, Forever: The ImageNet Storycited by 1
  36. 2022Seeing the Unseen: Errors and Bias in Visual Datasetscited by 0
  37. 2023Bi-Drop: Enhancing Fine-tuning Generalization via Synchronous sub-net Estimation and Optimizationcited by 0
  38. 2023Ethosight: A Reasoning-Guided Iterative Learning System for Nuanced Perception based on Joint-Embedding & Contextual Label Affinitycited by 0

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