# Adaptive Label Error Detection: A Bayesian Approach to Mislabeled Data Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10084 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10084/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03530/) (2016)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05394/) (2017)
- [Prevalence of Neural Collapse during the terminal phase of deep learning training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08186/) (2020)
- [MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14795/) (2021)
- [MentorNet: Learning Data-Driven Curriculum for Very Deep Neural Networks on Corrupted Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05055/) (2017)
- [Deep Neural Networks as Gaussian Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00165/) (2017)
- [Symmetric Cross Entropy for Robust Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06112/) (2019)
- [DeCAF: A Deep Convolutional Activation Feature for Generic Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.1531/) (2013)
- [Confident Learning: Estimating Uncertainty in Dataset Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00068/) (2019)
- [Pervasive Label Errors in Test Sets Destabilize Machine Learning Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14749/) (2021)
- [Training Deep Neural Networks on Noisy Labels with Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6596/) (2014)
- [Understanding and Utilizing Deep Neural Networks Trained with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05040/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning is Robust to Massive Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10694/) (2017)
- [Medical Image Analysis using Convolutional Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02250/) (2017)
- [On the geometry of generalization and memorization in deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14602/) (2021)
- [Robust Inference via Generative Classifiers for Handling Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11300/) (2019)
- [Minimum Covariance Determinant and Extensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07045/) (2017)
- [Gaussian Pre-Activations in Neural Networks: Myth or Reality?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12379/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine learning classification systems are susceptible to poor performance when trained with incorrect ground truth labels, even when data is well-curated by expert annotators. As machine learning becomes more widespread, it is increasingly imperative to identify and correct mislabeling to develop more powerful models. In this work, we motivate and describe Adaptive Label Error Detection (ALED), a novel method of detecting mislabeling. ALED extracts an intermediate feature space from a deep convolutional neural network, denoises the features, models the reduced manifold of each class with a multidimensional Gaussian distribution, and performs a simple likelihood ratio test to identify mislabeled samples. We show that ALED has markedly increased sensitivity, without compromising precision, compared to established label error detection methods, on multiple medical imaging datasets. We demonstrate an example where fine-tuning a neural network on corrected data results in a 33.8% decrease in test set errors, providing strong benefits to end users. The ALED detector is deployed in the Python package statlab.