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Nov 24

Aggregating Soft Labels from Crowd Annotations Improves Uncertainty Estimation Under Distribution Shift

Selecting an effective training signal for machine learning tasks is difficult: expert annotations are expensive, and crowd-sourced annotations may not be reliable. Recent work has demonstrated that learning from a distribution over labels acquired from crowd annotations can be effective both for performance and uncertainty estimation. However, this has mainly been studied using a limited set of soft-labeling methods in an in-domain setting. Additionally, no one method has been shown to consistently perform well across tasks, making it difficult to know a priori which to choose. To fill these gaps, this paper provides the first large-scale empirical study on learning from crowd labels in the out-of-domain setting, systematically analyzing 8 soft-labeling methods on 4 language and vision tasks. Additionally, we propose to aggregate soft-labels via a simple average in order to achieve consistent performance across tasks. We demonstrate that this yields classifiers with improved predictive uncertainty estimation in most settings while maintaining consistent raw performance compared to learning from individual soft-labeling methods or taking a majority vote of the annotations. We additionally highlight that in regimes with abundant or minimal training data, the selection of soft labeling method is less important, while for highly subjective labels and moderate amounts of training data, aggregation yields significant improvements in uncertainty estimation over individual methods. Code can be found at https://github.com/copenlu/aggregating-crowd-annotations-ood.

  • 2 authors
Dec 19, 2022

Cross-Modal Attribute Insertions for Assessing the Robustness of Vision-and-Language Learning

The robustness of multimodal deep learning models to realistic changes in the input text is critical for their applicability to important tasks such as text-to-image retrieval and cross-modal entailment. To measure robustness, several existing approaches edit the text data, but do so without leveraging the cross-modal information present in multimodal data. Information from the visual modality, such as color, size, and shape, provide additional attributes that users can include in their inputs. Thus, we propose cross-modal attribute insertions as a realistic perturbation strategy for vision-and-language data that inserts visual attributes of the objects in the image into the corresponding text (e.g., "girl on a chair" to "little girl on a wooden chair"). Our proposed approach for cross-modal attribute insertions is modular, controllable, and task-agnostic. We find that augmenting input text using cross-modal insertions causes state-of-the-art approaches for text-to-image retrieval and cross-modal entailment to perform poorly, resulting in relative drops of 15% in MRR and 20% in F_1 score, respectively. Crowd-sourced annotations demonstrate that cross-modal insertions lead to higher quality augmentations for multimodal data than augmentations using text-only data, and are equivalent in quality to original examples. We release the code to encourage robustness evaluations of deep vision-and-language models: https://github.com/claws-lab/multimodal-robustness-xmai.

  • 3 authors
Jun 19, 2023

Modeling Collaborator: Enabling Subjective Vision Classification With Minimal Human Effort via LLM Tool-Use

From content moderation to wildlife conservation, the number of applications that require models to recognize nuanced or subjective visual concepts is growing. Traditionally, developing classifiers for such concepts requires substantial manual effort measured in hours, days, or even months to identify and annotate data needed for training. Even with recently proposed Agile Modeling techniques, which enable rapid bootstrapping of image classifiers, users are still required to spend 30 minutes or more of monotonous, repetitive data labeling just to train a single classifier. Drawing on Fiske's Cognitive Miser theory, we propose a new framework that alleviates manual effort by replacing human labeling with natural language interactions, reducing the total effort required to define a concept by an order of magnitude: from labeling 2,000 images to only 100 plus some natural language interactions. Our framework leverages recent advances in foundation models, both large language models and vision-language models, to carve out the concept space through conversation and by automatically labeling training data points. Most importantly, our framework eliminates the need for crowd-sourced annotations. Moreover, our framework ultimately produces lightweight classification models that are deployable in cost-sensitive scenarios. Across 15 subjective concepts and across 2 public image classification datasets, our trained models outperform traditional Agile Modeling as well as state-of-the-art zero-shot classification models like ALIGN, CLIP, CuPL, and large visual question-answering models like PaLI-X.

  • 13 authors
Mar 4, 2024 1

Modeling with the Crowd: Optimizing the Human-Machine Partnership with Zooniverse

LSST and Euclid must address the daunting challenge of analyzing the unprecedented volumes of imaging and spectroscopic data that these next-generation instruments will generate. A promising approach to overcoming this challenge involves rapid, automatic image processing using appropriately trained Deep Learning (DL) algorithms. However, reliable application of DL requires large, accurately labeled samples of training data. Galaxy Zoo Express (GZX) is a recent experiment that simulated using Bayesian inference to dynamically aggregate binary responses provided by citizen scientists via the Zooniverse crowd-sourcing platform in real time. The GZX approach enables collaboration between human and machine classifiers and provides rapidly generated, reliably labeled datasets, thereby enabling online training of accurate machine classifiers. We present selected results from GZX and show how the Bayesian aggregation engine it uses can be extended to efficiently provide object-localization and bounding-box annotations of two-dimensional data with quantified reliability. DL algorithms that are trained using these annotations will facilitate numerous panchromatic data modeling tasks including morphological classification and substructure detection in direct imaging, as well as decontamination and emission line identification for slitless spectroscopy. Effectively combining the speed of modern computational analyses with the human capacity to extrapolate from few examples will be critical if the potential of forthcoming large-scale surveys is to be realized.

  • 5 authors
Mar 18, 2019

BEADs: Bias Evaluation Across Domains

Recent improvements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced natural language processing (NLP) applications. However, these models can also inherit and perpetuate biases from their training data. Addressing this issue is crucial, yet many existing datasets do not offer evaluation across diverse NLP tasks. To tackle this, we introduce the Bias Evaluations Across Domains (BEADs) dataset, designed to support a wide range of NLP tasks, including text classification, bias entity recognition, bias quantification, and benign language generation. BEADs uses AI-driven annotation combined with experts' verification to provide reliable labels. This method overcomes the limitations of existing datasets that typically depend on crowd-sourcing, expert-only annotations with limited bias evaluations, or unverified AI labeling. Our empirical analysis shows that BEADs is effective in detecting and reducing biases across different language models, with smaller models fine-tuned on BEADs often outperforming LLMs in bias classification tasks. However, these models may still exhibit biases towards certain demographics. Fine-tuning LLMs with our benign language data also reduces biases while preserving the models' knowledge. Our findings highlight the importance of comprehensive bias evaluation and the potential of targeted fine-tuning for reducing the bias of LLMs. We are making BEADs publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/shainar/BEAD Warning: This paper contains examples that may be considered offensive.

  • 3 authors
Jun 6, 2024

Are LLMs Better than Reported? Detecting Label Errors and Mitigating Their Effect on Model Performance

NLP benchmarks rely on standardized datasets for training and evaluating models and are crucial for advancing the field. Traditionally, expert annotations ensure high-quality labels; however, the cost of expert annotation does not scale well with the growing demand for larger datasets required by modern models. While crowd-sourcing provides a more scalable solution, it often comes at the expense of annotation precision and consistency. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to enhance the annotation process, particularly for detecting label errors in existing datasets. In this work, we consider the recent approach of LLM-as-a-judge, leveraging an ensemble of LLMs to flag potentially mislabeled examples. Through a case study of four datasets from the TRUE benchmark, covering different tasks and domains, we empirically analyze the labeling quality of existing datasets, and compare expert, crowd-sourced, and our LLM-based annotations in terms of agreement, label quality, and efficiency, demonstrating the strengths and limitations of each annotation method. Our findings reveal a substantial number of label errors, which, when corrected, induce a significant upward shift in reported model performance. This suggests that many of the LLMs so-called mistakes are due to label errors rather than genuine model failures. Additionally, we discuss the implications of mislabeled data and propose methods to mitigate them in training to improve model performance.

  • 5 authors
Oct 24, 2024 2

Physically Grounded Vision-Language Models for Robotic Manipulation

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have led to improved performance on tasks such as visual question answering and image captioning. Consequently, these models are now well-positioned to reason about the physical world, particularly within domains such as robotic manipulation. However, current VLMs are limited in their understanding of the physical concepts (e.g., material, fragility) of common objects, which restricts their usefulness for robotic manipulation tasks that involve interaction and physical reasoning about such objects. To address this limitation, we propose PhysObjects, an object-centric dataset of 36.9K crowd-sourced and 417K automated physical concept annotations of common household objects. We demonstrate that fine-tuning a VLM on PhysObjects improves its understanding of physical object concepts, by capturing human priors of these concepts from visual appearance. We incorporate this physically-grounded VLM in an interactive framework with a large language model-based robotic planner, and show improved planning performance on tasks that require reasoning about physical object concepts, compared to baselines that do not leverage physically-grounded VLMs. We additionally illustrate the benefits of our physically-grounded VLM on a real robot, where it improves task success rates. We release our dataset and provide further details and visualizations of our results at https://iliad.stanford.edu/pg-vlm/.

  • 8 authors
Sep 5, 2023 1

OmniEarth-Bench: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Earth's Six Spheres and Cross-Spheres Interactions with Multimodal Observational Earth Data

Existing benchmarks for Earth science multimodal learning exhibit critical limitations in systematic coverage of geosystem components and cross-sphere interactions, often constrained to isolated subsystems (only in Human-activities sphere or atmosphere) with limited evaluation dimensions (less than 16 tasks). To address these gaps, we introduce OmniEarth-Bench, the first comprehensive multimodal benchmark spanning all six Earth science spheres (atmosphere, lithosphere, Oceansphere, cryosphere, biosphere and Human-activities sphere) and cross-spheres with one hundred expert-curated evaluation dimensions. Leveraging observational data from satellite sensors and in-situ measurements, OmniEarth-Bench integrates 29,779 annotations across four tiers: perception, general reasoning, scientific knowledge reasoning and chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. This involves the efforts of 2-5 experts per sphere to establish authoritative evaluation dimensions and curate relevant observational datasets, 40 crowd-sourcing annotators to assist experts for annotations, and finally, OmniEarth-Bench is validated via hybrid expert-crowd workflows to reduce label ambiguity. Experiments on 9 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal that even the most advanced models struggle with our benchmarks, where none of them reach 35\% accuracy. Especially, in some cross-spheres tasks, the performance of leading models like GPT-4o drops to 0.0\%. OmniEarth-Bench sets a new standard for geosystem-aware AI, advancing both scientific discovery and practical applications in environmental monitoring and disaster prediction. The dataset, source code, and trained models were released.

  • 17 authors
May 29