Understanding the Resilience of Neural Network Ensembles against Faulty Training Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Machine learning is becoming more prevalent in safety-critical systems like autonomous vehicles and medical imaging. Faulty training data, where data is either misla-belled, missing, or duplicated, can increase the chance of misclassification, resulting in serious consequences. In this paper, we evaluate the resilience of ML ensembles against faulty training data, in order to understand how to build better ensembles. To support our evaluation, we develop a fault injection framework to systematically mutate training data, and introduce two diversity metrics that capture the distribution and entropy of predicted labels. Our experiments find that ensemble learning is more resilient than any individual model and that high accuracy neural networks are not necessarily more resilient to faulty training data. Further, we find that simple majority voting suffices in most cases for resilience in ML ensembles. Finally, we observe diminishing returns for resilience as we increase the number of models in an ensemble. These findings can help machine learning developers build ensembles that are both more resilient and more efficient.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".