Different Defects, Different Effects: A Controlled Audit of Face Recognition Training Data

arXiv:2610.28766v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The development of face recognition has been strongly supported by the availability of large-scale training datasets. Among them, MS-Celeb-1M has played an important role by providing millions of facial images from nearly 100K identities. However, the size and heterogeneity of such datasets increase the likelihood of annotation errors, redundant samples, and other forms of data inconsistency. This motivated the introduction of refined versions, such as MS1MV2 and MS1MV3, aimed at improving the quality of the training data. Despite these cleaning efforts, we show that several types of training-data defects remain in MS1MV3. By proposing complementary data-auditing strategies, we identify five defect categories: exact and near-duplicate images, split identities, crop errors, multiple-face ambiguity, and invalid content. We then assess the effect of correcting these defects under a controlled face-recognition training protocol based on IResNet-50 and ArcFace. The results show that targeted interventions can preserve, and in some cases improve, recognition performance while requiring fewer optimization steps to reach the performance of the original training set. Duplicate removal provides the clearest overall benefit, while split-identity merging and invalid-content removal also improve training efficiency. Overall, the results indicate that the effect of dataset cleaning depends strongly on the type of defect being addressed and provide further evidence that training-data quality remains an important and comparatively underexplored factor in large-scale face recognition. The training manifests and code used in this work will be released upon acceptance.