Same Target, Different Basins: Hard vs. Soft Labels for Annotator Distributions
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Computer Science > Machine Learning
Title:Same Target, Different Basins: Hard vs. Soft Labels for Annotator Distributions
Abstract:When annotators disagree, that disagreement can reflect epistemic uncertainty rather than simple label noise. We study hard-label delivery as an alternative to the usual choices of collapsing votes to a single label or training directly on the empirical soft-label distribution. We focus on two primary hard-label methods: multipass, which cycles through observed votes while keeping the dataset size fixed, and stochastic label sampling (SLS), which samples one label per example at the start of each epoch. On CIFAR-10H, we find that when only a small number of annotations per example is available, hard-label delivery improves over soft-label training, with larger improvements where the sparse empirical target is farther from the full annotator distribution. When full annotator distributions are available, both hard-label methods match soft-label training. We use deterministic control as an ablation of multipass and shuffled SLS as a control that breaks the example-to-distribution match. We also show that SLS and soft-label cross-entropy optimize the same expected objective. Hard-label delivery also converges to flatter basins, with supporting descriptive evidence from OOD detection on SVHN and CIFAR-100. Overall, these results suggest that multipass is a strong practical default when raw vote counts are available, while SLS offers a lightweight alternative that remains competitive when only a few votes per example are available and matches soft-label training when full annotator distributions are available.
| Comments: | 14 pages, 12 figures. Accepted to the 2nd Workshop on Epistemic Intelligence in Machine Learning (EIML @ ICML 2026) |
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.20642 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2605.20642v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.20642
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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