cleanlab

Documentation | Examples | Blog | Research | Cleanlab Studio | Community

cleanlab helps you clean data and labels by automatically detecting issues in a ML dataset. To facilitate machine learning with messy, real-world data, this data-centric AI package uses your existing models to estimate dataset problems that can be fixed to train even better models.

Examples of various issues in Cat/Dog dataset automatically detected by cleanlab via this code:

        lab = cleanlab.Datalab(data=dataset, label="column_name_for_labels")
        # Fit any ML model, get its feature_embeddings & pred_probs for your data
        lab.find_issues(features=feature_embeddings, pred_probs=pred_probs)
        lab.report()

• Use cleanlab to automatically check every: image, text, audio, or tabular dataset.
• Use cleanlab to automatically: detect data issues (outliers, duplicates, label errors, etc), train robust models, infer consensus + annotator-quality for multi-annotator data, suggest data to (re)label next (active learning).

---

Try easy mode with Cleanlab Studio

While this open-source package finds data issues, its utility depends on you having: a good existing ML model + an interface to efficiently fix these issues in your dataset. Providing all these pieces, Cleanlab Studio is a Data Curation platform to find and fix problems in any {image, text, tabular} dataset. Cleanlab Studio automatically runs optimized algorithms from this package on top of AutoML & Foundation models fit to your data, and presents detected issues (+ AI-suggested fixes) in an intelligent data correction interface.

Try it for free! Adopting Cleanlab Studio enables users of this package to:

• Work 100x faster (1 min to analyze your raw data with zero code or ML work; optionally use Python API)
• Produce better-quality data (10x more types of issues auto detected & corrected via built-in AI)
• Accomplish more (auto-label data, deploy ML instantly, audit LLM inputs/outputs, moderate content, ...)
• Monitor incoming data and detect issues in real-time (integrate your data pipeline on an Enterprise plan)

Run cleanlab open-source

This cleanlab package runs on Python 3.8+ and supports Linux, macOS, as well as Windows.

• Get started here! Install via pip or conda.
• Developers who install the bleeding-edge from source should refer to this master branch documentation.

Practicing data-centric AI can look like this:

1. Train initial ML model on original dataset.
2. Utilize this model to diagnose data issues (via cleanlab methods) and improve the dataset.
3. Train the same model on the improved dataset.
4. Try various modeling techniques to further improve performance.

Most folks jump from Step 1 → 4, but you may achieve big gains without any change to your modeling code by using cleanlab! Continuously boost performance by iterating Steps 2 → 4 (and try to evaluate with cleaned data).

Use cleanlab with any model and in most ML tasks

All features of cleanlab work with any dataset and any model. Yes, any model: PyTorch, Tensorflow, Keras, JAX, HuggingFace, OpenAI, XGBoost, scikit-learn, etc.

cleanlab is useful across a wide variety of Machine Learning tasks. Specific tasks this data-centric AI package offers dedicated functionality for include:

1. Binary and multi-class classification
2. Multi-label classification (e.g. image/document tagging)
3. Token classification (e.g. entity recognition in text)
4. Regression (predicting numerical column in a dataset)
5. Image segmentation (images with per-pixel annotations)
6. Object detection (images with bounding box annotations)
7. Classification with data labeled by multiple annotators
8. Active learning with multiple annotators (suggest which data to label or re-label to improve model most)
9. Outlier detection (identify atypical data that appears out of distribution)

For other ML tasks, cleanlab can still help you improve your dataset if appropriately applied. See our Example Notebooks and Blog.

So fresh, so cleanlab

Beyond automatically catching all sorts of issues lurking in your data, this data-centric AI package helps you deal with noisy labels and train more robust ML models. Here's an example:

# cleanlab works with **any classifier**. Yup, you can use PyTorch/TensorFlow/OpenAI/XGBoost/etc.
cl = cleanlab.classification.CleanLearning(sklearn.YourFavoriteClassifier())

# cleanlab finds data and label issues in **any dataset**... in ONE line of code!
label_issues = cl.find_label_issues(data, labels)

# cleanlab trains a robust version of your model that works more reliably with noisy data.
cl.fit(data, labels)

# cleanlab estimates the predictions you would have gotten if you had trained with *no* label issues.
cl.predict(test_data)

# A universal data-centric AI tool, cleanlab quantifies class-level issues and overall data quality, for any dataset.
cleanlab.dataset.health_summary(labels, confident_joint=cl.confident_joint)

cleanlab cleans your data's labels via state-of-the-art confident learning algorithms, published in this paper and blog. See some of the datasets cleaned with cleanlab at labelerrors.com.

cleanlab is:

1. backed by theory -- with provable guarantees of exact label noise estimation, even with imperfect models.
2. fast -- code is parallelized and scalable.
3. easy to use -- one line of code to find mislabeled data, bad annotators, outliers, or train noise-robust models.
4. general -- works with any dataset (text, image, tabular, audio,...) + any model (PyTorch, OpenAI, XGBoost,...)
   

Examples of incorrect given labels in various image datasets found and corrected using cleanlab. While these examples are from image datasets, this also works for text, audio, tabular data.

Citation and related publications

cleanlab is based on peer-reviewed research. Here are relevant papers to cite if you use this package:

Confident Learning (JAIR '21) (click to show bibtex)

@article{northcutt2021confidentlearning,
    title={Confident Learning: Estimating Uncertainty in Dataset Labels},
    author={Curtis G. Northcutt and Lu Jiang and Isaac L. Chuang},
    journal={Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)},
    volume={70},
    pages={1373--1411},
    year={2021}
}

Rank Pruning (UAI '17) (click to show bibtex)

@inproceedings{northcutt2017rankpruning,
    author={Northcutt, Curtis G. and Wu, Tailin and Chuang, Isaac L.},
    title={Learning with Confident Examples: Rank Pruning for Robust Classification with Noisy Labels},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence},
    series = {UAI'17},
    year = {2017},
    location = {Sydney, Australia},
    numpages = {10},
    url = {http://auai.org/uai2017/proceedings/papers/35.pdf},
    publisher = {AUAI Press},
}

Label Quality Scoring (ICML '22) (click to show bibtex)

@inproceedings{kuan2022labelquality,
    title={Model-agnostic label quality scoring to detect real-world label errors},
    author={Kuan, Johnson and Mueller, Jonas},
    booktitle={ICML DataPerf Workshop},
    year={2022}
}

Out-of-Distribution Detection (ICML '22) (click to show bibtex)

@inproceedings{kuan2022ood,
    title={Back to the Basics: Revisiting Out-of-Distribution Detection Baselines},
    author={Kuan, Johnson and Mueller, Jonas},
    booktitle={ICML Workshop on Principles of Distribution Shift},
    year={2022}
}

Token Classification Label Errors (NeurIPS '22) (click to show bibtex)

@inproceedings{wang2022tokenerrors,
    title={Detecting label errors in token classification data},
    author={Wang, Wei-Chen and Mueller, Jonas},
    booktitle={NeurIPS Workshop on Interactive Learning for Natural Language Processing (InterNLP)},
    year={2022}
}

CROWDLAB for Data with Multiple Annotators (NeurIPS '22) (click to show bibtex)

@inproceedings{goh2022crowdlab,
    title={CROWDLAB: Supervised learning to infer consensus labels and quality scores for data with multiple annotators},
    author={Goh, Hui Wen and Tkachenko, Ulyana and Mueller, Jonas},
    booktitle={NeurIPS Human in the Loop Learning Workshop},
    year={2022}
}

ActiveLab: Active learning with data re-labeling (ICLR '23) (click to show bibtex)

@inproceedings{goh2023activelab,
    title={ActiveLab: Active Learning with Re-Labeling by Multiple Annotators},
    author={Goh, Hui Wen and Mueller, Jonas},
    booktitle={ICLR Workshop on Trustworthy ML},
    year={2023}
}

Incorrect Annotations in Multi-Label Classification (ICLR '23) (click to show bibtex)

@inproceedings{thyagarajan2023multilabel,
    title={Identifying Incorrect Annotations in Multi-Label Classification Data},
    author={Thyagarajan, Aditya and Snorrason, Elías and Northcutt, Curtis and Mueller, Jonas},
    booktitle={ICLR Workshop on Trustworthy ML},
    year={2023}
}

Detecting Dataset Drift and Non-IID Sampling (ICML '23) (click to show bibtex)

@inproceedings{cummings2023drift,
    title={Detecting Dataset Drift and Non-IID Sampling via k-Nearest Neighbors},
    author={Cummings, Jesse and Snorrason, Elías and Mueller, Jonas},
    booktitle={ICML Workshop on Data-centric Machine Learning Research},
    year={2023}
}

Detecting Errors in Numerical Data (ICML '23) (click to show bibtex)

@inproceedings{zhou2023errors,
    title={Detecting Errors in Numerical Data via any Regression Model},
    author={Zhou, Hang and Mueller, Jonas and Kumar, Mayank and Wang, Jane-Ling and Lei, Jing},
    booktitle={ICML Workshop on Data-centric Machine Learning Research},
    year={2023}
}

ObjectLab: Mislabeled Images in Object Detection Data (ICML '23) (click to show bibtex)

@inproceedings{tkachenko2023objectlab,
    title={ObjectLab: Automated Diagnosis of Mislabeled Images in Object Detection Data},
    author={Tkachenko, Ulyana and Thyagarajan, Aditya and Mueller, Jonas},
    booktitle={ICML Workshop on Data-centric Machine Learning Research},
    year={2023}
}

Label Errors in Segmentation Data (ICML '23) (click to show bibtex)

@inproceedings{lad2023segmentation,
    title={Estimating label quality and errors in semantic segmentation data via any model},
    author={Lad, Vedang and Mueller, Jonas},
    booktitle={ICML Workshop on Data-centric Machine Learning Research},
    year={2023}
}

To understand/cite other cleanlab functionality not described above, check out our additional publications.

Other resources

• Example Notebooks demonstrating practical applications of this package

• Cleanlab Blog

• Blog post: Introduction to Confident Learning

• NeurIPS 2021 paper: Pervasive Label Errors in Test Sets Destabilize Machine Learning Benchmarks

• Introduction to Data-centric AI (MIT IAP Course 2023)

• Release notes for past versions

Join our community

• Learn, discuss, and shape the future of cleanlab in our 1000+ member Slack community.

• Interested in contributing? See the contributing guide, development guide, and ideas on useful contributions. We welcome your help building a standard open-source platform for data-centric AI!

• Have questions? Check out our FAQ, Github Issues, or Slack.

• Need professional help with your Data/AI project? Email us: [e-mail]
  For instance, we can help you monitor incoming data and detect issues in real-time.

License

Copyright (c) 2017 Cleanlab Inc.

cleanlab is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

cleanlab is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

See GNU Affero General Public LICENSE for details. You can email us to discuss licensing: [e-mail]

Commercial licensing

Commercial licensing is available for teams and enterprises that want to use cleanlab in production workflows, but are unable to open-source their code as is required by the current license. Please email us: [e-mail]