# QMix: Quality-aware Learning with Mixed Noise for Robust Retinal Disease Diagnosis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05169 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05169/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Learning to Reweight Examples for Robust Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09050/) (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)
- [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)
- [Joint Optimization Framework for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11364/) (2018)
- [Decoupling "when to update" from "how to update"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02613/) (2017)
- [Using Trusted Data to Train Deep Networks on Labels Corrupted by Severe Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05300/) (2018)
- [Probabilistic End-to-end Noise Correction for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07788/) (2019)
- [Deep learning with noisy labels: exploring techniques and remedies in medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02911/) (2019)
- [CurriculumNet: Weakly Supervised Learning from Large-Scale Web Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01097/) (2018)
- [Image Classification with Deep Learning in the Presence of Noisy Labels: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05170/) (2019)
- [Multi-Objective Interpolation Training for Robustness to Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04462/) (2020)
- [Augmentation Strategies for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02130/) (2021)
- [Beyond Class-Conditional Assumption: A Primary Attempt to Combat Instance-Dependent Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05458/) (2020)
- [UNICON: Combating Label Noise Through Uniform Selection and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14542/) (2022)
- [Evaluation of Retinal Image Quality Assessment Networks in Different Color-spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05345/) (2019)
- [Instance-Dependent Label-Noise Learning with Manifold-Regularized Transition Matrix Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02791/) (2022)
- [Robust Learning at Noisy Labeled Medical Images: Applied to Skin Lesion Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07759/) (2019)
- [Salvage Reusable Samples from Noisy Data for Robust Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02427/) (2020)
- [Cross-Field Transformer for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading on Two-field Fundus Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14552/) (2022)
- [Improving Medical Image Classification in Noisy Labels Using Only Self-supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04551/) (2023)
- [Which Strategies Matter for Noisy Label Classification? Insight into Loss and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06218/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [A Versatile Pathology Co-pilot via Reasoning Enhanced Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17303/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Real-World Medical Image Classification with Noisy Labels: Challenges, Practice, and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09315/) (2025)
- [Modular Transformer Architecture for Precision Agriculture Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03751/) (2025)
- [Solutions for Mitotic Figure Detection and Atypical Classification in MIDOG 2025](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02597/) (2025)
- [Learning to Fuse and Reconstruct Multi-View Graphs for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21944/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Due to the complexity of medical image acquisition and the difficulty of annotation, medical image datasets inevitably contain noise. Noisy data with wrong labels affects the robustness and generalization ability of deep neural networks. Previous noise learning methods mainly considered noise arising from images being mislabeled, i.e. label noise, assuming that all mislabeled images are of high image quality. However, medical images are prone to suffering extreme quality issues, i.e. data noise, where discriminative visual features are missing for disease diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a noise learning framework, termed as QMix, that learns a robust disease diagnosis model under mixed noise. QMix alternates between sample separation and quality-aware semisupervised training in each training epoch. In the sample separation phase, we design a joint uncertainty-loss criterion to effectively separate (1) correctly labeled images; (2) mislabeled images with high quality and (3) mislabeled images with low quality. In the semi-supervised training phase, we train a disease diagnosis model to learn robust feature representation from the separated samples. Specifically, we devise a sample-reweighing loss to mitigate the effect of mislabeled images with low quality during training. Meanwhile, a contrastive enhancement loss is proposed to further distinguish mislabeled images with low quality from correctly labeled images. QMix achieved state-of-the-art disease diagnosis performance on five public retinal image datasets and exhibited substantial improvement on robustness against mixed noise.