# Benchmarking Instance-Dependent Label Noise with Controlled Corruptions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14965 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14965/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Revisiting Deep Learning Models for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11959/) (2021)
- [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)
- [DeiT III: Revenge of the ViT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07118/) (2022)
- [Confident Learning: Estimating Uncertainty in Dataset Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00068/) (2019)
- [Training Deep Neural Networks on Noisy Labels with Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6596/) (2014)
- [WebVision Database: Visual Learning and Understanding from Web Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02862/) (2017)
- [Human uncertainty makes classification more robust](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07086/) (2019)
- [CleanNet: Transfer Learning for Scalable Image Classifier Training with Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07131/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning is Robust to Massive Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10694/) (2017)
- [MNIST-C: A Robustness Benchmark for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02337/) (2019)
- [Confidence Scores Make Instance-dependent Label-noise Learning Possible](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03772/) (2020)
- [Label-Noise Learning with Intrinsically Long-Tailed Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09833/) (2022)
- [An Instance-Dependent Simulation Framework for Learning with Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11413/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Synthetic instance-dependent label noise (IDN) benchmarks are widely used to evaluate noisy-label learning methods, yet existing approaches typically generate noise through imperfect annotators or classifier raters, leaving the source of ambiguity implicit. We introduce CILN, a benchmark generation framework that creates IDN through controlled input corruptions. A diverse voter pool labels corrupted instances, producing benchmark datasets in which both the source and severity of ambiguity are explicit and controllable. Using CIFAR10, MNIST, and Adult, we construct 90 benchmark settings spanning multiple corruption families and severity levels. Our experiments show that the resulting benchmarks exhibit genuine instance-dependent noise, provide diverse confusion structures, and, on CIFAR-10, can produce label distributions that are closer to human uncertainty than an existing synthetic IDN benchmark. We further demonstrate that corruption-mediated IDN can expose failure modes of popular noisy-label learning methods, including Co-Teaching and DivideMix, that are not observed under comparable levels of rater-fallibility noise. These findings suggest that noise structure, not only noise rate, plays an important role in benchmark difficulty and algorithm behavior. By making ambiguity generation explicit and controllable, CILN provides a complementary benchmarking framework for studying noisy-label learning under diverse sources of instance difficulty.