We identify label errors in the test sets of 10 of the most commonly-used
computer vision, natural language, and audio datasets, and subsequently study
the potential for these label errors to affect benchmark results. Errors in
test sets are numerous and widespread: we estimate an average of at least 3.3%
errors across the 10 datasets, where for example label errors comprise at least
6% of the ImageNet validation set. Putative label errors are identified using
confident learning algorithms and then human-validated via crowdsourcing (51%
of the algorithmically-flagged candidates are indeed erroneously labeled, on
average across the datasets). Traditionally, machine learning practitioners
choose which model to deploy based on test accuracy - our findings advise
caution here, proposing that judging models over correctly labeled test sets
may be more useful, especially for noisy real-world datasets. Surprisingly, we
find that lower capacity models may be practically more useful than higher
capacity models in real-world datasets with high proportions of erroneously
labeled data. For example, on ImageNet with corrected labels: ResNet-18
outperforms ResNet-50 if the prevalence of originally mislabeled test examples
increases by just 6%. On CIFAR-10 with corrected labels: VGG-11 outperforms
VGG-19 if the prevalence of originally mislabeled test examples increases by
just 5%. Test set errors across the 10 datasets can be viewed at
https://labelerrors.com and all label errors can be reproduced by
https://github.com/cleanlab/label-errors.