# Neural Relation Graph: A Unified Framework for Identifying Label Noise and Outlier Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12321 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12321/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07421/) (2020)
- [Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07569/) (2018)
- [Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02690/) (2017)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [DivideMix: Learning with Noisy Labels as Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07394/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study of Example Forgetting during Deep Neural Network Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05159/) (2018)
- [MentorNet: Learning Data-Driven Curriculum for Very Deep Neural Networks on Corrupted Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05055/) (2017)
- [AST: Audio Spectrogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01778/) (2021)
- [Data Shapley: Equitable Valuation of Data for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02868/) (2019)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06507/) (2022)
- [Estimating Training Data Influence by Tracing Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08484/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [A Survey of Graph Neural Networks in Real world: Imbalance, Noise, Privacy and OOD Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04468/) (2024)
- [CLIPCleaner: Cleaning Noisy Labels with CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10012/) (2024)
- [OpenMIBOOD: Open Medical Imaging Benchmarks for Out-Of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16247/) (2025)
- [Conjugated Semantic Pool Improves OOD Detection with Pre-trained Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08611/) (2024)
- [Unified Classification and Rejection: A One-versus-All Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13355/) (2023)
- [OpenCIL: Benchmarking Out-of-Distribution Detection in Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06045/) (2024)
- [AdaSCALE: Adaptive Scaling for OOD Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08023/) (2025)
- [Generalized Source Tracing: Detecting Novel Audio Deepfake Algorithm with Real Emphasis and Fake Dispersion Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03240/) (2024)
- [Outlier Synthesis via Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16718/) (2025)
- [Expecting The Unexpected: Towards Broad Out-Of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11480/) (2023)
- [OpenEarthSensing: Large-Scale Fine-Grained Benchmark for Open-World Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20668/) (2025)
- [Spurious-Aware Prototype Refinement for Reliable Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23881/) (2025)
- [Finer Disentanglement of Aleatoric Uncertainty Can Accelerate Chemical Histopathology Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20532/) (2025)
- [Proxy-Anchor and EVT-Driven Continual Learning Method for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08550/) (2025)
- [Semantic or Covariate? A Study on the Intractable Case of Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11254/) (2024)
- [TrustLoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation for Failure Detection under Out-of-distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14545/) (2025)
- [DCV-ROOD Evaluation Framework: Dual Cross-Validation for Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05778/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Out-of-Distribution Detection for Plankton Recognition: A Systematic Evaluation of Advanced Methods in Marine Ecological Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17179/) (2025)
- [DREAM: Dual-Standard Semantic Homogeneity with Dynamic Optimization for Graph Learning with Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17449/) (2026)
- [Training-Free Out-of-Distribution Detection for Pathology Whole-Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01407/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diagnosing and cleaning data is a crucial step for building robust machine learning systems. However, identifying problems within large-scale datasets with real-world distributions is challenging due to the presence of complex issues such as label errors, under-representation, and outliers. In this paper, we propose a unified approach for identifying the problematic data by utilizing a largely ignored source of information: a relational structure of data in the feature-embedded space. To this end, we present scalable and effective algorithms for detecting label errors and outlier data based on the relational graph structure of data. We further introduce a visualization tool that provides contextual information of a data point in the feature-embedded space, serving as an effective tool for interactively diagnosing data. We evaluate the label error and outlier/out-of-distribution (OOD) detection performances of our approach on the large-scale image, speech, and language domain tasks, including ImageNet, ESC-50, and SST2. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on all tasks considered and demonstrates its effectiveness in debugging large-scale real-world datasets across various domains. We release codes at https://github.com/snu-mllab/Neural-Relation-Graph.