Papers › Re-labeling ImageNet: from Single to Multi-Labels, from Global to Localized Labels

Re-labeling ImageNet: from Single to Multi-Labels, from Global to Localized Labels

13 Jan 2021CVPR 2021 1arXiv:2101.05022archive 2025-07-28

Sangdoo Yun, Seong Joon Oh, Byeongho Heo, Dongyoon Han, Junsuk Choe, Sanghyuk Chun

ImageNet has been arguably the most popular image classification benchmark, but it is also the one with a significant level of label noise. Recent studies have shown that many samples contain multiple classes, despite being assumed to be a single-label benchmark. They have thus proposed to turn ImageNet evaluation into a multi-label task, with exhaustive multi-label annotations per image. However, they have not fixed the training set, presumably because of a formidable annotation cost. We argue that the mismatch between single-label annotations and effectively multi-label images is equally, if not more, problematic in the training setup, where random crops are applied. With the single-label annotations, a random crop of an image may contain an entirely different object from the ground truth, introducing noisy or even incorrect supervision during training. We thus re-label the ImageNet training set with multi-labels. We address the annotation cost barrier by letting a strong image classifier, trained on an extra source of data, generate the multi-labels. We utilize the pixel-wise multi-label predictions before the final pooling layer, in order to exploit the additional location-specific supervision signals. Training on the re-labeled samples results in improved model performances across the board. ResNet-50 attains the top-1 classification accuracy of 78.9% on ImageNet with our localized multi-labels, which can be further boosted to 80.2% with the CutMix regularization. We show that the models trained with localized multi-labels also outperforms the baselines on transfer learning to object detection and instance segmentation tasks, and various robustness benchmarks. The re-labeled ImageNet training set, pre-trained weights, and the source code are available at {https://github.com/naver-ai/relabel_imagenet}.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

naver-ai/relabel_imagenet officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
aiiu-lab/naturalistic-adversarial-patch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Image ClassificationInstance SegmentationObject DetectionSemantic SegmentationTransfer Learningimage-classificationobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Classification ImageNet ReXNet_1.0-relabel Number of params 4.8M #836 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ReXNet_1.0-relabel Top 1 Accuracy 78.4% #836 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification OmniBenchmark ReLabel Average Top-1 Accuracy 30.8 #20 of 22 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

CutMix

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections