# Detecting Mislabeled and Corrupted Data via Pointwise Mutual Information

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07713 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07713/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2025.

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03530/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Symmetric Cross Entropy for Robust Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06112/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Using Pre-Training Can Improve Model Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09960/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Label Noise Modeling and Loss Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11238/) (2019)
- [WebVision Database: Visual Learning and Understanding from Web Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02862/) (2017)
- [Using Trusted Data to Train Deep Networks on Labels Corrupted by Severe Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05300/) (2018)
- [Are Anchor Points Really Indispensable in Label-Noise Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00189/) (2019)
- [Does label smoothing mitigate label noise?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02819/) (2020)
- [CleanNet: Transfer Learning for Scalable Image Classifier Training with Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07131/) (2017)
- [Dual T: Reducing Estimation Error for Transition Matrix in Label-noise Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07805/) (2020)
- [Beyond Class-Conditional Assumption: A Primary Attempt to Combat Instance-Dependent Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05458/) (2020)
- [To Smooth or Not? When Label Smoothing Meets Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04149/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning over Multi-field Categorical Data: A Case Study on User Response Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.02376/) (2016)
- [Interactive Label Cleaning with Example-based Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03922/) (2021)
- [Robot Data Curation with Mutual Information Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08623/) (2025)
- [DeepRank: A New Deep Architecture for Relevance Ranking in Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05649/) (2017)
- [Submodular Mutual Information for Targeted Data Subset Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00043/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural networks can memorize corrupted labels, making data quality critical for model performance, yet real-world datasets are frequently compromised by both label noise and input noise. This paper proposes a mutual information-based framework for data selection under hybrid noise scenarios that quantifies statistical dependencies between inputs and labels. We compute each sample's pointwise contribution to the overall mutual information and find that lower contributions indicate noisy or mislabeled instances. Empirical validation on MNIST with different synthetic noise settings demonstrates that the method effectively filters low-quality samples. Under label corruption, training on high-MI samples improves classification accuracy by up to 15% compared to random sampling. Furthermore, the method exhibits robustness to benign input modifications, preserving semantically valid data while filtering truly corrupted samples.