# MILD: Modeling the Instance Learning Dynamics for Learning with Noisy Labels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11560 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11560/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05394/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Making Deep Neural Networks Robust to Label Noise: a Loss Correction Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03683/) (2016)
- [MentorNet: Learning Data-Driven Curriculum for Very Deep Neural Networks on Corrupted Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05055/) (2017)
- [Learning from Noisy Labels with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08199/) (2020)
- [Robust Loss Functions under Label Noise for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09482/) (2017)
- [Early-Learning Regularization Prevents Memorization of Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00151/) (2020)
- [How does Disagreement Help Generalization against Label Corruption?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04215/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Label Noise Modeling and Loss Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11238/) (2019)
- [Training Deep Neural Networks on Noisy Labels with Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6596/) (2014)
- [Deep Multi-modal Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving: Datasets, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07830/) (2019)
- [Combating noisy labels by agreement: A joint training method with co-regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02752/) (2020)
- [WebVision Database: Visual Learning and Understanding from Web Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02862/) (2017)
- [Normalized Loss Functions for Deep Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13554/) (2020)
- [Learning with Noisy Labels Revisited: A Study Using Real-World Human Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12088/) (2021)
- [Understanding and Utilizing Deep Neural Networks Trained with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05040/) (2019)
- [SELF: Learning to Filter Noisy Labels with Self-Ensembling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01842/) (2019)
- [Learning with Instance-Dependent Label Noise: A Sample Sieve Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02347/) (2020)
- [A Second-Order Approach to Learning with Instance-Dependent Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11854/) (2020)
- [Multi-Objective Interpolation Training for Robustness to Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04462/) (2020)
- [FINE Samples for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11628/) (2021)
- [A Topological Filter for Learning with Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04835/) (2020)
- [Superpixel-guided Iterative Learning from Noisy Labels for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10100/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Data Optimization in Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16499/) (2023)
- [ChronoSelect: Robust Learning with Noisy Labels via Dynamics Temporal Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18183/) (2025)
- [Set a Thief to Catch a Thief: Combating Label Noise through Noisy Meta Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16104/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite deep learning has achieved great success, it often relies on a large amount of training data with accurate labels, which are expensive and time-consuming to collect. A prominent direction to reduce the cost is to learn with noisy labels, which are ubiquitous in the real-world applications. A critical challenge for such a learning task is to reduce the effect of network memorization on the falsely-labeled data. In this work, we propose an iterative selection approach based on the Weibull mixture model, which identifies clean data by considering the overall learning dynamics of each data instance. In contrast to the previous small-loss heuristics, we leverage the observation that deep network is easy to memorize and hard to forget clean data. In particular, we measure the difficulty of memorization and forgetting for each instance via the transition times between being misclassified and being memorized in training, and integrate them into a novel metric for selection. Based on the proposed metric, we retain a subset of identified clean data and repeat the selection procedure to iteratively refine the clean subset, which is finally used for model training. To validate our method, we perform extensive experiments on synthetic noisy datasets and real-world web data, and our strategy outperforms existing noisy-label learning methods.