Daily Papers

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise in knowledge-intensive tasks but face limitations in complex multi-step reasoning. While recent methods have integrated RAG with chain-of-thought reasoning or test-time search using Process Reward Models (PRMs), these approaches encounter challenges such as a lack of explanations, bias in PRM training data, early-step bias in PRM scores, and insufficient post-training optimization of reasoning potential. To address these issues, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning through Trustworthy Process Rewarding (ReARTeR), a framework that enhances RAG systems' reasoning capabilities through post-training and test-time scaling. At test time, ReARTeR introduces Trustworthy Process Rewarding via a Process Reward Model for accurate scalar scoring and a Process Explanation Model (PEM) for generating natural language explanations, enabling step refinement. During post-training, it utilizes Monte Carlo Tree Search guided by Trustworthy Process Rewarding to collect high-quality step-level preference data, optimized through Iterative Preference Optimization. ReARTeR addresses three core challenges: (1) misalignment between PRM and PEM, tackled through off-policy preference learning; (2) bias in PRM training data, mitigated by balanced annotation methods and stronger annotations for challenging examples; and (3) early-step bias in PRM, resolved through a temporal-difference-based look-ahead search strategy. Experimental results on multi-step reasoning benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements, underscoring ReARTeR's potential to advance the reasoning capabilities of RAG systems.

High-quality Machine Translation (MT) evaluation relies heavily on human judgments. Comprehensive error classification methods, such as Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), are expensive as they are time-consuming and can only be done by experts, whose availability may be limited especially for low-resource languages. On the other hand, just assigning overall scores, like Direct Assessment (DA), is simpler and faster and can be done by translators of any level, but is less reliable. In this paper, we introduce Error Span Annotation (ESA), a human evaluation protocol which combines the continuous rating of DA with the high-level error severity span marking of MQM. We validate ESA by comparing it to MQM and DA for 12 MT systems and one human reference translation (English to German) from WMT23. The results show that ESA offers faster and cheaper annotations than MQM at the same quality level, without the requirement of expensive MQM experts.

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation enables models to recognize and segment objects from arbitrary natural language descriptions, offering the flexibility to handle novel, fine-grained, or functionally defined categories beyond fixed label sets. While this capability is crucial for large-scale urban point clouds that support applications such as digital twins, smart city management, and urban analytics, it remains largely unexplored in this domain. The main obstacles are the frequent absence of high-quality, well-aligned multi-view imagery in large-scale urban point cloud datasets and the poor generalization of existing three-dimensional (3D) segmentation pipelines across diverse urban environments with substantial variation in geometry, scale, and appearance. To address these challenges, we present OpenUrban3D, the first 3D open-vocabulary semantic segmentation framework for large-scale urban scenes that operates without aligned multi-view images, pre-trained point cloud segmentation networks, or manual annotations. Our approach generates robust semantic features directly from raw point clouds through multi-view, multi-granularity rendering, mask-level vision-language feature extraction, and sample-balanced fusion, followed by distillation into a 3D backbone model. This design enables zero-shot segmentation for arbitrary text queries while capturing both semantic richness and geometric priors. Extensive experiments on large-scale urban benchmarks, including SensatUrban and SUM, show that OpenUrban3D achieves significant improvements in both segmentation accuracy and cross-scene generalization over existing methods, demonstrating its potential as a flexible and scalable solution for 3D urban scene understanding.

Natural language processing (NLP) utilizes text data augmentation to overcome sample size constraints. Increasing the sample size is a natural and widely used strategy for alleviating these challenges. In this study, we chose Arabic to increase the sample size and correct grammatical errors. Arabic is considered one of the languages with limited resources for grammatical error correction (GEC). Furthermore, QALB-14 and QALB-15 are the only datasets used in most Arabic grammatical error correction research, with approximately 20,500 parallel examples, which is considered low compared with other languages. Therefore, this study aims to develop an Arabic corpus called "Tibyan" for grammatical error correction using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is used as a data augmenter tool based on a pair of Arabic sentences containing grammatical errors matched with a sentence free of errors extracted from Arabic books, called guide sentences. Multiple steps were involved in establishing our corpus, including the collection and pre-processing of a pair of Arabic texts from various sources, such as books and open-access corpora. We then used ChatGPT to generate a parallel corpus based on the text collected previously, as a guide for generating sentences with multiple types of errors. By engaging linguistic experts to review and validate the automatically generated sentences, we ensured that they were correct and error-free. The corpus was validated and refined iteratively based on feedback provided by linguistic experts to improve its accuracy. Finally, we used the Arabic Error Type Annotation tool (ARETA) to analyze the types of errors in the Tibyan corpus. Our corpus contained 49 of errors, including seven types: orthography, morphology, syntax, semantics, punctuation, merge, and split. The Tibyan corpus contains approximately 600 K tokens.

Media coverage has a substantial effect on the public perception of events. Nevertheless, media outlets are often biased. One way to bias news articles is by altering the word choice. The automatic identification of bias by word choice is challenging, primarily due to the lack of a gold standard data set and high context dependencies. This paper presents BABE, a robust and diverse data set created by trained experts, for media bias research. We also analyze why expert labeling is essential within this domain. Our data set offers better annotation quality and higher inter-annotator agreement than existing work. It consists of 3,700 sentences balanced among topics and outlets, containing media bias labels on the word and sentence level. Based on our data, we also introduce a way to detect bias-inducing sentences in news articles automatically. Our best performing BERT-based model is pre-trained on a larger corpus consisting of distant labels. Fine-tuning and evaluating the model on our proposed supervised data set, we achieve a macro F1-score of 0.804, outperforming existing methods.

This paper introduces the Balanced Arabic Readability Evaluation Corpus (BAREC), a large-scale, fine-grained dataset for Arabic readability assessment. BAREC consists of 69,441 sentences spanning 1+ million words, carefully curated to cover 19 readability levels, from kindergarten to postgraduate comprehension. The corpus balances genre diversity, topical coverage, and target audiences, offering a comprehensive resource for evaluating Arabic text complexity. The corpus was fully manually annotated by a large team of annotators. The average pairwise inter-annotator agreement, measured by Quadratic Weighted Kappa, is 81.8%, reflecting a high level of substantial agreement. Beyond presenting the corpus, we benchmark automatic readability assessment across different granularity levels, comparing a range of techniques. Our results highlight the challenges and opportunities in Arabic readability modeling, demonstrating competitive performance across various methods. To support research and education, we make BAREC openly available, along with detailed annotation guidelines and benchmark results.

The detection of façade elements on buildings, such as doors, windows, balconies, air conditioning units, billboards, and glass curtain walls, is a critical step in automating the creation of Building Information Modeling (BIM). Yet, this field faces significant challenges, including the uneven distribution of façade elements, the presence of small objects, and substantial background noise, which hamper detection accuracy. To address these issues, we develop the BFA-YOLO model and the BFA-3D dataset in this study. The BFA-YOLO model is an advanced architecture designed specifically for analyzing multi-view images of façade attachments. It integrates three novel components: the Feature Balanced Spindle Module (FBSM) that tackles the issue of uneven object distribution; the Target Dynamic Alignment Task Detection Head (TDATH) that enhances the detection of small objects; and the Position Memory Enhanced Self-Attention Mechanism (PMESA), aimed at reducing the impact of background noise. These elements collectively enable BFA-YOLO to effectively address each challenge, thereby improving model robustness and detection precision. The BFA-3D dataset, offers multi-view images with precise annotations across a wide range of façade attachment categories. This dataset is developed to address the limitations present in existing façade detection datasets, which often feature a single perspective and insufficient category coverage. Through comparative analysis, BFA-YOLO demonstrated improvements of 1.8\% and 2.9\% in mAP_{50} on the BFA-3D dataset and the public Façade-WHU dataset, respectively, when compared to the baseline YOLOv8 model. These results highlight the superior performance of BFA-YOLO in façade element detection and the advancement of intelligent BIM technologies.

Recently, Text-to-Image (T2I) generation models have achieved significant advancements. Correspondingly, many automated metrics have emerged to evaluate the image-text alignment capabilities of generative models. However, the performance comparison among these automated metrics is limited by existing small datasets. Additionally, these datasets lack the capacity to assess the performance of automated metrics at a fine-grained level. In this study, we contribute an EvalMuse-40K benchmark, gathering 40K image-text pairs with fine-grained human annotations for image-text alignment-related tasks. In the construction process, we employ various strategies such as balanced prompt sampling and data re-annotation to ensure the diversity and reliability of our benchmark. This allows us to comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of image-text alignment metrics for T2I models. Meanwhile, we introduce two new methods to evaluate the image-text alignment capabilities of T2I models: FGA-BLIP2 which involves end-to-end fine-tuning of a vision-language model to produce fine-grained image-text alignment scores and PN-VQA which adopts a novel positive-negative VQA manner in VQA models for zero-shot fine-grained evaluation. Both methods achieve impressive performance in image-text alignment evaluations. We also use our methods to rank current AIGC models, in which the results can serve as a reference source for future study and promote the development of T2I generation. The data and code will be made publicly available.

Automatically detecting abnormal events in videos is crucial for modern autonomous systems, yet existing Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) benchmarks lack the scene diversity, balanced anomaly coverage, and temporal complexity needed to reliably assess real-world performance. Meanwhile, the community is increasingly moving toward Video Anomaly Understanding (VAU), which requires deeper semantic and causal reasoning but remains difficult to benchmark due to the heavy manual annotation effort it demands. In this paper, we introduce Pistachio, a new VAD/VAU benchmark constructed entirely through a controlled, generation-based pipeline. By leveraging recent advances in video generation models, Pistachio provides precise control over scenes, anomaly types, and temporal narratives, effectively eliminating the biases and limitations of Internet-collected datasets. Our pipeline integrates scene-conditioned anomaly assignment, multi-step storyline generation, and a temporally consistent long-form synthesis strategy that produces coherent 41-second videos with minimal human intervention. Extensive experiments demonstrate the scale, diversity, and complexity of Pistachio, revealing new challenges for existing methods and motivating future research on dynamic and multi-event anomaly understanding.

High-quality data annotation is an essential but laborious and costly aspect of developing machine learning-based software. We explore the inherent tradeoff between annotation accuracy and cost by detecting and removing minority reports -- instances where annotators provide incorrect responses -- that indicate unnecessary redundancy in task assignments. We propose an approach to prune potentially redundant annotation task assignments before they are executed by estimating the likelihood of an annotator disagreeing with the majority vote for a given task. Our approach is informed by an empirical analysis over computer vision datasets annotated by a professional data annotation platform, which reveals that the likelihood of a minority report event is dependent primarily on image ambiguity, worker variability, and worker fatigue. Simulations over these datasets show that we can reduce the number of annotations required by over 60% with a small compromise in label quality, saving approximately 6.6 days-equivalent of labor. Our approach provides annotation service platforms with a method to balance cost and dataset quality. Machine learning practitioners can tailor annotation accuracy levels according to specific application needs, thereby optimizing budget allocation while maintaining the data quality necessary for critical settings like autonomous driving technology.

Recent neural codec language models have made great progress in the field of text-to-speech (TTS), but controllable emotional TTS still faces many challenges. Traditional methods rely on predefined discrete emotion labels to control emotion categories and intensities, which can't capture the complexity and continuity of human emotional perception and expression. The lack of large-scale emotional speech datasets with balanced emotion distributions and fine-grained emotion annotations often causes overfitting in synthesis models and impedes effective emotion control. To address these issues, we propose UDDETTS, a neural codec language model unifying discrete and dimensional emotions for controllable emotional TTS. This model introduces the interpretable Arousal-Dominance-Valence (ADV) space for dimensional emotion description and supports emotion control driven by either discrete emotion labels or nonlinearly quantified ADV values. Furthermore, a semi-supervised training strategy is designed to comprehensively utilize diverse speech datasets with different types of emotion annotations to train the UDDETTS. Experiments show that UDDETTS achieves linear emotion control along the three dimensions of ADV space, and exhibits superior end-to-end emotional speech synthesis capabilities.

Socially compliant navigation requires structured reasoning over dynamic pedestrians and physical constraints to ensure safe and interpretable decisions. However, existing social navigation datasets often lack explicit reasoning supervision and exhibit highly long-tailed action distributions, limiting models' ability to learn safety-critical behaviors. To address these issues, we introduce MUSON, a multimodal dataset for short-horizon social navigation collected across diverse indoor and outdoor campus scenes. MUSON adopts a structured five-step Chain-of-Thought annotation consisting of perception, prediction, reasoning, action, and explanation, with explicit modeling of static physical constraints and a rationally balanced discrete action space. Compared to SNEI, MUSON provides consistent reasoning, action, and explanation. Benchmarking multiple state-of-the-art Small Vision Language Models on MUSON shows that Qwen2.5-VL-3B achieves the highest decision accuracy of 0.8625, demonstrating that MUSON serves as an effective and reusable benchmark for socially compliant navigation. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/MARSLab/MUSON

Critical Error Detection (CED) in machine translation aims to determine whether a translation is safe to use or contains unacceptable deviations in meaning. While the WMT21 English-German CED dataset provided the first benchmark, it is limited in scale, label balance, domain coverage, and temporal freshness. We present SynCED-EnDe, a new resource consisting of 1,000 gold-labeled and 8,000 silver-labeled sentence pairs, balanced 50/50 between error and non-error cases. SynCED-EnDe draws from diverse 2024-2025 sources (StackExchange, GOV.UK) and introduces explicit error subclasses, structured trigger flags, and fine-grained auxiliary judgments (obviousness, severity, localization complexity, contextual dependency, adequacy deviation). These enrichments enable systematic analyses of error risk and intricacy beyond binary detection. The dataset is permanently hosted on GitHub and Hugging Face, accompanied by documentation, annotation guidelines, and baseline scripts. Benchmark experiments with XLM-R and related encoders show substantial performance gains over WMT21 due to balanced labels and refined annotations. We envision SynCED-EnDe as a community resource to advance safe deployment of MT in information retrieval and conversational assistants, particularly in emerging contexts such as wearable AI devices.

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents are rapidly progressing toward autonomous interaction and reliable task execution across diverse applications. However, two central challenges remain unresolved: automating the evaluation of agent trajectories and generating high-quality training data at scale to enable continual improvement. Existing approaches often depend on manual annotation or static rule-based verification, which restricts scalability and limits adaptability in dynamic environments. We present MagicGUI-RMS, a multi-agent reward model system that delivers adaptive trajectory evaluation, corrective feedback, and self-evolving learning capabilities. MagicGUI-RMS integrates a Domain-Specific Reward Model (DS-RM) with a General-Purpose Reward Model (GP-RM), enabling fine-grained action assessment and robust generalization across heterogeneous GUI tasks. To support reward learning at scale, we design a structured data construction pipeline that automatically produces balanced and diverse reward datasets, effectively reducing annotation costs while maintaining sample fidelity. During execution, the reward model system identifies erroneous actions, proposes refined alternatives, and continuously enhances agent behavior through an automated data-reflux mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MagicGUI-RMS yields substantial gains in task accuracy, behavioral robustness. These results establish MagicGUI-RMS as a principled and effective foundation for building self-improving GUI agents driven by reward-based adaptation.

This work presents Orient Anything V2, an enhanced foundation model for unified understanding of object 3D orientation and rotation from single or paired images. Building upon Orient Anything V1, which defines orientation via a single unique front face, V2 extends this capability to handle objects with diverse rotational symmetries and directly estimate relative rotations. These improvements are enabled by four key innovations: 1) Scalable 3D assets synthesized by generative models, ensuring broad category coverage and balanced data distribution; 2) An efficient, model-in-the-loop annotation system that robustly identifies 0 to N valid front faces for each object; 3) A symmetry-aware, periodic distribution fitting objective that captures all plausible front-facing orientations, effectively modeling object rotational symmetry; 4) A multi-frame architecture that directly predicts relative object rotations. Extensive experiments show that Orient Anything V2 achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on orientation estimation, 6DoF pose estimation, and object symmetry recognition across 11 widely used benchmarks. The model demonstrates strong generalization, significantly broadening the applicability of orientation estimation in diverse downstream tasks.

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is an important part of human-computer interaction, receiving extensive attention from both industry and academia. However, the current research field of SER has long suffered from the following problems: 1) There are few reasonable and universal splits of the datasets, making comparing different models and methods difficult. 2) No commonly used benchmark covers numerous corpus and languages for researchers to refer to, making reproduction a burden. In this paper, we propose EmoBox, an out-of-the-box multilingual multi-corpus speech emotion recognition toolkit, along with a benchmark for both intra-corpus and cross-corpus settings. For intra-corpus settings, we carefully designed the data partitioning for different datasets. For cross-corpus settings, we employ a foundation SER model, emotion2vec, to mitigate annotation errors and obtain a test set that is fully balanced in speakers and emotions distributions. Based on EmoBox, we present the intra-corpus SER results of 10 pre-trained speech models on 32 emotion datasets with 14 languages, and the cross-corpus SER results on 4 datasets with the fully balanced test sets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest SER benchmark, across language scopes and quantity scales. We hope that our toolkit and benchmark can facilitate the research of SER in the community.

Despite steady progress in layout-to-image generation, current methods still struggle with layouts containing significant overlap between bounding boxes. We identify two primary challenges: (1) large overlapping regions and (2) overlapping instances with minimal semantic distinction. Through both qualitative examples and quantitative analysis, we demonstrate how these factors degrade generation quality. To systematically assess this issue, we introduce OverLayScore, a novel metric that quantifies the complexity of overlapping bounding boxes. Our analysis reveals that existing benchmarks are biased toward simpler cases with low OverLayScore values, limiting their effectiveness in evaluating model performance under more challenging conditions. To bridge this gap, we present OverLayBench, a new benchmark featuring high-quality annotations and a balanced distribution across different levels of OverLayScore. As an initial step toward improving performance on complex overlaps, we also propose CreatiLayout-AM, a model fine-tuned on a curated amodal mask dataset. Together, our contributions lay the groundwork for more robust layout-to-image generation under realistic and challenging scenarios. Project link: https://mlpc-ucsd.github.io/OverLayBench.

The rapid evolution of generative models has led to a continuous emergence of multimodal safety risks, exposing the limitations of existing defense methods. To address these challenges, we propose ProGuard, a vision-language proactive guard that identifies and describes out-of-distribution (OOD) safety risks without the need for model adjustments required by traditional reactive approaches. We first construct a modality-balanced dataset of 87K samples, each annotated with both binary safety labels and risk categories under a hierarchical multimodal safety taxonomy, effectively mitigating modality bias and ensuring consistent moderation across text, image, and text-image inputs. Based on this dataset, we train our vision-language base model purely through reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve efficient and concise reasoning. To approximate proactive safety scenarios in a controlled setting, we further introduce an OOD safety category inference task and augment the RL objective with a synonym-bank-based similarity reward that encourages the model to generate concise descriptions for unseen unsafe categories. Experimental results show that ProGuard achieves performance comparable to closed-source large models on binary safety classification, substantially outperforms existing open-source guard models on unsafe content categorization. Most notably, ProGuard delivers a strong proactive moderation ability, improving OOD risk detection by 52.6% and OOD risk description by 64.8%.

Accurate segmentation and classification of brain tumors from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) remain key challenges in medical image analysis, primarily due to the lack of high-quality, balanced, and diverse datasets with expert annotations. In this work, we address this gap by introducing BRISC, a dataset designed for brain tumor segmentation and classification tasks, featuring high-resolution segmentation masks. The dataset comprises 6,000 contrast-enhanced T1-weighted MRI scans, which were collated from multiple public datasets that lacked segmentation labels. Our primary contribution is the subsequent expert annotation of these images, performed by certified radiologists and physicians. It includes three major tumor types, namely glioma, meningioma, and pituitary, as well as non-tumorous cases. Each sample includes high-resolution labels and is categorized across axial, sagittal, and coronal imaging planes to facilitate robust model development and cross-view generalization. To demonstrate the utility of the dataset, we provide benchmark results for both tasks using standard deep learning models. The BRISC dataset is made publicly available. datasetlink: Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/briscdataset/brisc2025/), Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30533120), Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17524350)

This study explores the emerging area of continual panoptic segmentation, highlighting three key balances. First, we introduce past-class backtrace distillation to balance the stability of existing knowledge with the adaptability to new information. This technique retraces the features associated with past classes based on the final label assignment results, performing knowledge distillation targeting these specific features from the previous model while allowing other features to flexibly adapt to new information. Additionally, we introduce a class-proportional memory strategy, which aligns the class distribution in the replay sample set with that of the historical training data. This strategy maintains a balanced class representation during replay, enhancing the utility of the limited-capacity replay sample set in recalling prior classes. Moreover, recognizing that replay samples are annotated only for the classes of their original step, we devise balanced anti-misguidance losses, which combat the impact of incomplete annotations without incurring classification bias. Building upon these innovations, we present a new method named Balanced Continual Panoptic Segmentation (BalConpas). Our evaluation on the challenging ADE20K dataset demonstrates its superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. The official code is available at https://github.com/jinpeng0528/BalConpas.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been a central technique for recent large language model (LLM) alignment. However, its heavy dependence on costly human or LLM-as-Judge preference feedback could stymie its wider applications. In this work, we introduce Self-Contrast, a feedback-free large language model alignment method via exploiting extensive self-generated negatives. With only supervised fine-tuning (SFT) targets, Self-Contrast leverages the LLM itself to generate massive diverse candidates, and harnesses a pre-trained embedding model to filter multiple negatives according to text similarity. Theoretically, we illustrate that in this setting, merely scaling negative responses can still effectively approximate situations with more balanced positive and negative preference annotations. Our experiments with direct preference optimization (DPO) on three datasets show that, Self-Contrast could consistently outperform SFT and standard DPO training by large margins. And as the number of self-generated negatives increases, the performance of Self-Contrast continues to grow. Code and data are available at https://github.com/THUDM/Self-Contrast.

The introduction of the MUStARD dataset, and its emotion recognition extension MUStARD++, have identified sarcasm to be a multi-modal phenomenon -- expressed not only in natural language text, but also through manners of speech (like tonality and intonation) and visual cues (facial expression). With this work, we aim to perform a rigorous benchmarking of the MUStARD++ dataset by considering state-of-the-art language, speech, and visual encoders, for fully utilizing the totality of the multi-modal richness that it has to offer, achieving a 2\% improvement in macro-F1 over the existing benchmark. Additionally, to cure the imbalance in the `sarcasm type' category in MUStARD++, we propose an extension, which we call MUStARD++ Balanced, benchmarking the same with instances from the extension split across both train and test sets, achieving a further 2.4\% macro-F1 boost. The new clips were taken from a novel source -- the TV show, House MD, which adds to the diversity of the dataset, and were manually annotated by multiple annotators with substantial inter-annotator agreement in terms of Cohen's kappa and Krippendorf's alpha. Our code, extended data, and SOTA benchmark models are made public.

In this paper, we uncover a systematic bias in the evaluation paradigm of adopting large language models~(LLMs), e.g., GPT-4, as a referee to score and compare the quality of responses generated by candidate models. We find that the quality ranking of candidate responses can be easily hacked by simply altering their order of appearance in the context. This manipulation allows us to skew the evaluation result, making one model appear considerably superior to the other, e.g., Vicuna-13B could beat ChatGPT on 66 over 80 tested queries with ChatGPT as an evaluator. To address this issue, we propose a calibration framework with three simple yet effective strategies: 1) Multiple Evidence Calibration, which requires the evaluator model to generate multiple evaluation evidence before assigning ratings; 2) Balanced Position Calibration, which aggregates results across various orders to determine the final score; 3) Human-in-the-Loop Calibration, which introduces a balanced position diversity entropy to measure the difficulty of each example and seeks human assistance when needed. We also manually annotate the "win/tie/lose" outcomes of responses from ChatGPT and Vicuna-13B in the Vicuna Benchmark's question prompt, and extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach successfully mitigates evaluation bias, resulting in closer alignment with human judgments. We release our code and human annotation at https://github.com/i-Eval/FairEval to facilitate future research.

Rigorous evaluation of large language models (LLMs) relies on comparing models by the prevalence of desirable or undesirable behaviors, such as task pass rates or policy violations. These prevalence estimates are produced by a classifier, either an LLM-as-a-judge or human annotators, making the choice of classifier central to trustworthy evaluation. Common metrics used for this choice, such as Accuracy, Precision, and F1, are sensitive to class imbalance and to arbitrary choices of positive class, and can favor judges that distort prevalence estimates. We show that Youden's J statistic is theoretically aligned with choosing the best judge to compare models, and that Balanced Accuracy is an equivalent linear transformation of J. Through both analytical arguments and empirical examples and simulations, we demonstrate how selecting judges using Balanced Accuracy leads to better, more robust classifier selection.

A well-formulated benchmark plays a critical role in spurring advancements in the natural language processing (NLP) field, as it allows objective and precise evaluation of diverse models. As modern language models (LMs) have become more elaborate and sophisticated, more difficult benchmarks that require linguistic knowledge and reasoning have been proposed. However, most of these benchmarks only support English, and great effort is necessary to construct benchmarks for other low resource languages. To this end, we propose a new benchmark named Korean balanced evaluation of significant tasks (KoBEST), which consists of five Korean-language downstream tasks. Professional Korean linguists designed the tasks that require advanced Korean linguistic knowledge. Moreover, our data is purely annotated by humans and thoroughly reviewed to guarantee high data quality. We also provide baseline models and human performance results. Our dataset is available on the Huggingface.

Disagreement in annotation is a common phenomenon in the development of NLP datasets and serves as a valuable source of insight. While majority voting remains the dominant strategy for aggregating labels, recent work has explored modeling individual annotators to preserve their perspectives. However, modeling each annotator is resource-intensive and remains underexplored across various NLP tasks. We propose an agreement-based clustering technique to model the disagreement between the annotators. We conduct comprehensive experiments in 40 datasets in 18 typologically diverse languages, covering three subjective NLP tasks: sentiment analysis, emotion classification, and hate speech detection. We evaluate four aggregation approaches: majority vote, ensemble, multi-label, and multitask. The results demonstrate that agreement-based clustering can leverage the full spectrum of annotator perspectives and significantly enhance classification performance in subjective NLP tasks compared to majority voting and individual annotator modeling. Regarding the aggregation approach, the multi-label and multitask approaches are better for modeling clustered annotators than an ensemble and model majority vote.

The long-tail distribution of the visual world poses great challenges for deep learning based classification models on how to handle the class imbalance problem. Existing solutions usually involve class-balancing strategies, e.g., by loss re-weighting, data re-sampling, or transfer learning from head- to tail-classes, but most of them adhere to the scheme of jointly learning representations and classifiers. In this work, we decouple the learning procedure into representation learning and classification, and systematically explore how different balancing strategies affect them for long-tailed recognition. The findings are surprising: (1) data imbalance might not be an issue in learning high-quality representations; (2) with representations learned with the simplest instance-balanced (natural) sampling, it is also possible to achieve strong long-tailed recognition ability by adjusting only the classifier. We conduct extensive experiments and set new state-of-the-art performance on common long-tailed benchmarks like ImageNet-LT, Places-LT and iNaturalist, showing that it is possible to outperform carefully designed losses, sampling strategies, even complex modules with memory, by using a straightforward approach that decouples representation and classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/classifier-balancing.

Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is an important task with obvious application areas in social media, e.g. when indicating hate speech and fake news. In our survey of previous work, we note that there is no large-scale social media data set with sentiment polarity annotations for Finnish. This publications aims to remedy this shortcoming by introducing a 27,000 sentence data set annotated independently with sentiment polarity by three native annotators. We had the same three annotators for the whole data set, which provides a unique opportunity for further studies of annotator behaviour over time. We analyse their inter-annotator agreement and provide two baselines to validate the usefulness of the data set.

Online hate speech is a recent problem in our society that is rising at a steady pace by leveraging the vulnerabilities of the corresponding regimes that characterise most social media platforms. This phenomenon is primarily fostered by offensive comments, either during user interaction or in the form of a posted multimedia context. Nowadays, giant corporations own platforms where millions of users log in every day, and protection from exposure to similar phenomena appears to be necessary in order to comply with the corresponding legislation and maintain a high level of service quality. A robust and reliable system for detecting and preventing the uploading of relevant content will have a significant impact on our digitally interconnected society. Several aspects of our daily lives are undeniably linked to our social profiles, making us vulnerable to abusive behaviours. As a result, the lack of accurate hate speech detection mechanisms would severely degrade the overall user experience, although its erroneous operation would pose many ethical concerns. In this paper, we present 'ETHOS', a textual dataset with two variants: binary and multi-label, based on YouTube and Reddit comments validated using the Figure-Eight crowdsourcing platform. Furthermore, we present the annotation protocol used to create this dataset: an active sampling procedure for balancing our data in relation to the various aspects defined. Our key assumption is that, even gaining a small amount of labelled data from such a time-consuming process, we can guarantee hate speech occurrences in the examined material.

Active Learning (AL) addresses the high costs of collecting human annotations by strategically annotating the most informative samples. However, for subjective NLP tasks, incorporating a wide range of perspectives in the annotation process is crucial to capture the variability in human judgments. We introduce Annotator-Centric Active Learning (ACAL), which incorporates an annotator selection strategy following data sampling. Our objective is two-fold: (1) to efficiently approximate the full diversity of human judgments, and (2) to assess model performance using annotator-centric metrics, which emphasize minority perspectives over a majority. We experiment with multiple annotator selection strategies across seven subjective NLP tasks, employing both traditional and novel, human-centered evaluation metrics. Our findings indicate that ACAL improves data efficiency and excels in annotator-centric performance evaluations. However, its success depends on the availability of a sufficiently large and diverse pool of annotators to sample from.

The NLP community has long advocated for the construction of multi-annotator datasets to better capture the nuances of language interpretation, subjectivity, and ambiguity. This paper conducts a retrospective study to show how performance scores can vary when a dataset expands from a single annotation per instance to multiple annotations. We propose a novel multi-annotator simulation process to generate datasets with varying annotation budgets. We show that similar datasets with the same annotation budget can lead to varying performance gains. Our findings challenge the popular belief that models trained on multi-annotation examples always lead to better performance than models trained on single or few-annotation examples.

Retrieval models are often evaluated on partially-annotated datasets. Each query is mapped to a few relevant texts and the remaining corpus is assumed to be irrelevant. As a result, models that successfully retrieve false negatives are punished in evaluation. Unfortunately, completely annotating all texts for every query is not resource efficient. In this work, we show that using partially-annotated datasets in evaluation can paint a distorted picture. We curate D-MERIT, a passage retrieval evaluation set from Wikipedia, aspiring to contain all relevant passages for each query. Queries describe a group (e.g., ``journals about linguistics'') and relevant passages are evidence that entities belong to the group (e.g., a passage indicating that Language is a journal about linguistics). We show that evaluating on a dataset containing annotations for only a subset of the relevant passages might result in misleading ranking of the retrieval systems and that as more relevant texts are included in the evaluation set, the rankings converge. We propose our dataset as a resource for evaluation and our study as a recommendation for balance between resource-efficiency and reliable evaluation when annotating evaluation sets for text retrieval.

In large organisations, identifying experts on a given topic is crucial in leveraging the internal knowledge spread across teams and departments. So-called enterprise expert retrieval systems automatically discover and structure employees' expertise based on the vast amount of heterogeneous data available about them and the work they perform. Evaluating these systems requires comprehensive ground truth expert annotations, which are hard to obtain. Therefore, the annotation process typically relies on automated recommendations of knowledge areas to validate. This case study provides an analysis of how these recommendations can impact the evaluation of expert finding systems. We demonstrate on a popular benchmark that system-validated annotations lead to overestimated performance of traditional term-based retrieval models and even invalidate comparisons with more recent neural methods. We also augment knowledge areas with synonyms to uncover a strong bias towards literal mentions of their constituent words. Finally, we propose constraints to the annotation process to prevent these biased evaluations, and show that this still allows annotation suggestions of high utility. These findings should inform benchmark creation or selection for expert finding, to guarantee meaningful comparison of methods.

Human annotation is the empirical foundation of much NLP research, from dataset construction to model evaluation, but papers often leave unclear who produced the annotations and how the annotation process was controlled. We provide the first large-scale, task-level audit of human annotation reporting across major NLP venues, asking which annotation details are documented, which are missing, and how reporting varies across time, topic, venue, and intended use of human judgment. We introduce a unified taxonomy of annotation-reporting practices and validate an LLM-assisted extraction pipeline against Annotated-gold, a human-adjudicated gold standard of 41 papers and 72 annotation tasks, where the best model reaches human-comparable agreement with adjudicated labels, with Krippendorff's alpha of 0.606 versus 0.585 for human-human agreement. Using this pipeline, we construct Annotated-llm, a dataset covering ACL-venue papers from 2018-2025, with 2,667 extracted annotation tasks from 1,603 papers, and find that papers frequently report operational details such as recruitment strategies, annotator expertise, and annotation volume, but often omit details needed to assess annotation validity, including training, language proficiency, compensation, socio-demographics, adjudication, and agreement values, especially in model-evaluation studies. Our results show that annotation reporting in NLP has improved over time but remains uneven, and they establish a scalable framework and bare-minimum reporting recommendations for making human annotation more reliable, reproducible, and interpretable.

We present a corpus of 5,000 richly annotated abstracts of medical articles describing clinical randomized controlled trials. Annotations include demarcations of text spans that describe the Patient population enrolled, the Interventions studied and to what they were Compared, and the Outcomes measured (the `PICO' elements). These spans are further annotated at a more granular level, e.g., individual interventions within them are marked and mapped onto a structured medical vocabulary. We acquired annotations from a diverse set of workers with varying levels of expertise and cost. We describe our data collection process and the corpus itself in detail. We then outline a set of challenging NLP tasks that would aid searching of the medical literature and the practice of evidence-based medicine.

While user-generated product reviews often contain large quantities of information, their utility in addressing natural language product queries has been limited, with a key challenge being the need to aggregate information from multiple low-level sources (reviews) to a higher item level during retrieval. Existing methods for reviewed-item retrieval (RIR) typically take a late fusion (LF) approach which computes query-item scores by simply averaging the top-K query-review similarity scores for an item. However, we demonstrate that for multi-aspect queries and multi-aspect items, LF is highly sensitive to the distribution of aspects covered by reviews in terms of aspect frequency and the degree of aspect separation across reviews. To address these LF failures, we propose several novel aspect fusion (AF) strategies which include Large Language Model (LLM) query extraction and generative reranking. Our experiments show that for imbalanced review corpora, AF can improve over LF by a MAP@10 increase from 0.36 to 0.52, while achieving equivalent performance for balanced review corpora.

Many computer scientists use the aggregated answers of online workers to represent ground truth. Prior work has shown that aggregation methods such as majority voting are effective for measuring relatively objective features. For subjective features such as semantic connotation, online workers, known for optimizing their hourly earnings, tend to deteriorate in the quality of their responses as they work longer. In this paper, we aim to address this issue by proposing a quality-aware semantic data annotation system. We observe that with timely feedback on workers' performance quantified by quality scores, better informed online workers can maintain the quality of their labeling throughout an extended period of time. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed annotation system through i) evaluating performance based on an expert-labeled dataset, and ii) demonstrating machine learning tasks that can lead to consistent learning behavior with 70%-80% accuracy. Our results suggest that with our system, researchers can collect high-quality answers of subjective semantic features at a large scale.

In this paper we address the scarcity of annotated data for NArabizi, a Romanized form of North African Arabic used mostly on social media, which poses challenges for Natural Language Processing (NLP). We introduce an enriched version of NArabizi Treebank (Seddah et al., 2020) with three main contributions: the addition of two novel annotation layers (named entity recognition and offensive language detection) and a re-annotation of the tokenization, morpho-syntactic and syntactic layers that ensure annotation consistency. Our experimental results, using different tokenization schemes, showcase the value of our contributions and highlight the impact of working with non-gold tokenization for NER and dependency parsing. To facilitate future research, we make these annotations publicly available. Our enhanced NArabizi Treebank paves the way for creating sophisticated language models and NLP tools for this under-represented language.

We introduce a new balanced assignment of experts (BASE) layer for large language models that greatly simplifies existing high capacity sparse layers. Sparse layers can dramatically improve the efficiency of training and inference by routing each token to specialized expert modules that contain only a small fraction of the model parameters. However, it can be difficult to learn balanced routing functions that make full use of the available experts; existing approaches typically use routing heuristics or auxiliary expert-balancing loss functions. In contrast, we formulate token-to-expert allocation as a linear assignment problem, allowing an optimal assignment in which each expert receives an equal number of tokens. This optimal assignment scheme improves efficiency by guaranteeing balanced compute loads, and also simplifies training by not requiring any new hyperparameters or auxiliary losses. Code is publicly released at https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/

With PRECISE, we extended Prediction-Powered Inference to produce bias-corrected estimates of ranking evaluation metrics by combining a small human-labeled set with a large LLM-judged set. PPI is provably unbiased regardless of the LLM judge's error profile. We make it applicable to hierarchical metrics like Precision@K, where annotations are per-document but the metric is per-query, by reducing the output-space computation from O(2^|C|) to O(2^K). On the ESCI benchmark, augmenting 30 human annotations with Claude 3 Sonnet judgments reduces the standard error of Precision@4 estimates from 4.45 to 3.50 (a 21% relative reduction). In a production system, our framework correctly identified the best of three system variants from 100 human labels and 2 hours of domain-expert annotation; A/B testing confirmed this ranking with +407 bps in daily sales.

Developers rely on code comments to document their work, track issues, and understand the source code. As such, comments provide valuable insights into developers' understanding of their code and describe their various intentions in writing the surrounding code. Recent research leverages natural language processing and deep learning to classify comments based on developers' intentions. However, such labelled data are often imbalanced, causing learning models to perform poorly. This work investigates the use of different weighting strategies of the loss function to mitigate the scarcity of certain classes in the dataset. In particular, various RoBERTa-based transformer models are fine-tuned by means of a hyperparameter search to identify their optimal parameter configurations. Additionally, we fine-tuned the transformers with different weighting strategies for the loss function to address class imbalances. Our approach outperforms the STACC baseline by 8.9 per cent on the NLBSE'25 Tool Competition dataset in terms of the average F1_c score, and exceeding the baseline approach in 17 out of 19 cases with a gain ranging from -5.0 to 38.2. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/moritzmock/NLBSE2025.

Biomedical research is growing at such an exponential pace that scientists, researchers, and practitioners are no more able to cope with the amount of published literature in the domain. The knowledge presented in the literature needs to be systematized in such a way that claims and hypotheses can be easily found, accessed, and validated. Knowledge graphs can provide such a framework for semantic knowledge representation from literature. However, in order to build a knowledge graph, it is necessary to extract knowledge as relationships between biomedical entities and normalize both entities and relationship types. In this paper, we present and compare few rule-based and machine learning-based (Naive Bayes, Random Forests as examples of traditional machine learning methods and DistilBERT, PubMedBERT, T5 and SciFive-based models as examples of modern deep learning transformers) methods for scalable relationship extraction from biomedical literature, and for the integration into the knowledge graphs. We examine how resilient are these various methods to unbalanced and fairly small datasets. Our experiments show that transformer-based models handle well both small (due to pre-training on a large dataset) and unbalanced datasets. The best performing model was the PubMedBERT-based model fine-tuned on balanced data, with a reported F1-score of 0.92. DistilBERT-based model followed with F1-score of 0.89, performing faster and with lower resource requirements. BERT-based models performed better then T5-based generative models.

As the NLP community increasingly addresses challenges associated with multilingualism, robust annotation tools are essential to handle multilingual datasets efficiently. In this paper, we introduce a code-mixed multilingual text annotation framework, COMMENTATOR, specifically designed for annotating code-mixed text. The tool demonstrates its effectiveness in token-level and sentence-level language annotation tasks for Hinglish text. We perform robust qualitative human-based evaluations to showcase COMMENTATOR led to 5x faster annotations than the best baseline. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/lingo-iitgn/commentator. The demonstration video is available at https://bit.ly/commentator_video.

We study the effectiveness of data-balancing for mitigating biases in contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP), identifying areas of strength and limitation. First, we reaffirm prior conclusions that CLIP models can inadvertently absorb societal stereotypes. To counter this, we present a novel algorithm, called Multi-Modal Moment Matching (M4), designed to reduce both representation and association biases (i.e. in first- and second-order statistics) in multimodal data. We use M4 to conduct an in-depth analysis taking into account various factors, such as the model, representation, and data size. Our study also explores the dynamic nature of how CLIP learns and unlearns biases. In particular, we find that fine-tuning is effective in countering representation biases, though its impact diminishes for association biases. Also, data balancing has a mixed impact on quality: it tends to improve classification but can hurt retrieval. Interestingly, data and architectural improvements seem to mitigate the negative impact of data balancing on performance; e.g. applying M4 to SigLIP-B/16 with data quality filters improves COCO image-to-text retrieval @5 from 86% (without data balancing) to 87% and ImageNet 0-shot classification from 77% to 77.5%! Finally, we conclude with recommendations for improving the efficacy of data balancing in multimodal systems.

Human evaluation is increasingly critical for assessing large language models, capturing linguistic nuances, and reflecting user preferences more accurately than traditional automated metrics. However, the resource-intensive nature of this type of annotation process poses significant challenges. The key question driving our work: "is it feasible to minimize human-in-the-loop feedback by prioritizing data instances which most effectively distinguish between models?" We evaluate several metric-based methods and find that these metrics enhance the efficiency of human evaluations by minimizing the number of required annotations, thus saving time and cost, while ensuring a robust performance evaluation. We show that our method is effective across widely used model families, reducing instances of indecisive (or "tie") outcomes by up to 54% compared to a random sample when focusing on the top-20 percentile of prioritized instances. This potential reduction in required human effort positions our approach as a valuable strategy in future large language model evaluations.

When developing new large language models (LLMs), a key step is evaluating their final performance, often by computing the win-rate against a reference model based on external feedback. Human feedback is the gold standard, particularly for capturing nuanced qualities like coherence, readability, and alignment with human expectations. However, human evaluations are costly -- even for large tech companies -- and when conducted with active users, they may negatively impact user experience. A promising alternative is synthetic feedback, where evaluations are conducted by other large language models, including reward models. While this eliminates the need for costly human annotations, it introduces biases that may distort the evaluation process. In this work, we propose a statistically principled framework that integrates human and synthetic feedback to reduce reliance on human annotations while maintaining unbiased win-rate calculations. Our experiments demonstrate a reduction in human annotations by up to 12.2% with an off-the-shelf synthetic evaluator and up to 24.8% with a finetuned variant. Apart from being generalizable, scalable, and free of hyper-parameter tuning, our method offers predictable annotation savings, which can be estimated based on data-dependent characteristics.

Multimodal learning has gained attention for its capacity to integrate information from different modalities. However, it is often hindered by the multimodal imbalance problem, where certain modality dominates while others remain underutilized. Although recent studies have proposed various methods to alleviate this problem, they lack comprehensive and fair comparisons. In this paper, we systematically categorize various mainstream multimodal imbalance algorithms into four groups based on the strategies they employ to mitigate imbalance. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of these methods, we introduce BalanceBenchmark, a benchmark including multiple widely used multidimensional datasets and evaluation metrics from three perspectives: performance, imbalance degree, and complexity. To ensure fair comparisons, we have developed a modular and extensible toolkit that standardizes the experimental workflow across different methods. Based on the experiments using BalanceBenchmark, we have identified several key insights into the characteristics and advantages of different method groups in terms of performance, balance degree and computational complexity. We expect such analysis could inspire more efficient approaches to address the imbalance problem in the future, as well as foundation models. The code of the toolkit is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/BalanceBenchmark.

Selecting appropriate training data is crucial for effective instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), which aims to (1) elicit strong capabilities, and (2) achieve balanced performance across a diverse range of tasks. Influence-based methods show promise in achieving (1) by estimating the contribution of each training example to the model's predictions, but often struggle with (2). Our systematic investigation reveals that this underperformance can be attributed to an inherent bias where certain tasks intrinsically have greater influence than others. As a result, data selection is often biased towards these tasks, not only hurting the model's performance on others but also, counterintuitively, harms performance on these high-influence tasks themselves. As a remedy, we propose BIDS, a Balanced and Influential Data Selection algorithm. BIDS first normalizes influence scores of the training data, and then iteratively balances data selection by choosing the training example with the highest influence on the most underrepresented task. Experiments with both Llama-3 and Mistral-v0.3 on seven benchmarks spanning five diverse capabilities show that BIDS consistently outperforms both state-of-the-art influence-based algorithms and other non-influence-based selection frameworks. Surprisingly, training on a 15% subset selected by BIDS can even outperform full-dataset training with a much more balanced performance. Our analysis further highlights the importance of both instance-level normalization and iterative optimization of selected data for balanced learning of diverse capabilities.

The detection of controversial content in political discussions on the Internet is a critical challenge in maintaining healthy digital discourse. Unlike much of the existing literature that relies on synthetically balanced data, our work preserves the natural distribution of controversial and non-controversial posts. This real-world imbalance highlights a core challenge that needs to be addressed for practical deployment. Our study re-evaluates well-established methods for detecting controversial content. We curate our own dataset focusing on the Indian political context that preserves the natural distribution of controversial content, with only 12.9% of the posts in our dataset being controversial. This disparity reflects the true imbalance in real-world political discussions and highlights a critical limitation in the existing evaluation methods. Benchmarking on datasets that model data imbalance is vital for ensuring real-world applicability. Thus, in this work, (i) we release our dataset, with an emphasis on class imbalance, that focuses on the Indian political context, (ii) we evaluate existing methods from this domain on this dataset and demonstrate their limitations in the imbalanced setting, (iii) we introduce an intuitive metric to measure a model's robustness to class imbalance, (iv) we also incorporate ideas from the domain of Topological Data Analysis, specifically Persistent Homology, to curate features that provide richer representations of the data. Furthermore, we benchmark models trained with topological features against established baselines.

Anthropogenic ecological crisis constitutes a significant challenge that all within the academy must urgently face, including the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. While recent years have seen increasing work revolving around climate-centric discourse, crucial environmental and ecological topics outside of climate change remain largely unaddressed, despite their prominent importance. Mainstream NLP tasks, such as sentiment analysis, dominate the scene, but there remains an untouched space in the literature involving the analysis of environmental impacts of certain events and practices. To address this gap, this paper presents EcoVerse, an annotated English Twitter dataset of 3,023 tweets spanning a wide spectrum of environmental topics. We propose a three-level annotation scheme designed for Eco-Relevance Classification, Stance Detection, and introducing an original approach for Environmental Impact Analysis. We detail the data collection, filtering, and labeling process that led to the creation of the dataset. Remarkable Inter-Annotator Agreement indicates that the annotation scheme produces consistent annotations of high quality. Subsequent classification experiments using BERT-based models, including ClimateBERT, are presented. These yield encouraging results, while also indicating room for a model specifically tailored for environmental texts. The dataset is made freely available to stimulate further research.

When it comes to deploying deep vision models, the behavior of these systems must be explicable to ensure confidence in their reliability and fairness. A common approach to evaluate deep learning models is to build a labeled test set with attributes of interest and assess how well it performs. However, creating a balanced test set (i.e., one that is uniformly sampled over all the important traits) is often time-consuming, expensive, and prone to mistakes. The question we try to address is: can we evaluate the sensitivity of deep learning models to arbitrary visual attributes without an annotated test set? This paper argues the case that Zero-shot Model Diagnosis (ZOOM) is possible without the need for a test set nor labeling. To avoid the need for test sets, our system relies on a generative model and CLIP. The key idea is enabling the user to select a set of prompts (relevant to the problem) and our system will automatically search for semantic counterfactual images (i.e., synthesized images that flip the prediction in the case of a binary classifier) using the generative model. We evaluate several visual tasks (classification, key-point detection, and segmentation) in multiple visual domains to demonstrate the viability of our methodology. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of producing counterfactual images and offering sensitivity analysis for model diagnosis without the need for a test set.

This article presents the creation of an Estonian-language dataset for document-level subjectivity, analyzes the resulting annotations, and reports an initial experiment of automatic subjectivity analysis using a large language model (LLM). The dataset comprises of 1,000 documents-300 journalistic articles and 700 randomly selected web texts-each rated for subjectivity on a continuous scale from 0 (fully objective) to 100 (fully subjective) by four annotators. As the inter-annotator correlations were moderate, with some texts receiving scores at the opposite ends of the scale, a subset of texts with the most divergent scores was re-annotated, with the inter-annotator correlation improving. In addition to human annotations, the dataset includes scores generated by GPT-5 as an experiment on annotation automation. These scores were similar to human annotators, however several differences emerged, suggesting that while LLM based automatic subjectivity scoring is feasible, it is not an interchangeable alternative to human annotation, and its suitability depends on the intended application.

This paper presents a new challenging information extraction task in the domain of materials science. We develop an annotation scheme for marking information on experiments related to solid oxide fuel cells in scientific publications, such as involved materials and measurement conditions. With this paper, we publish our annotation guidelines, as well as our SOFC-Exp corpus consisting of 45 open-access scholarly articles annotated by domain experts. A corpus and an inter-annotator agreement study demonstrate the complexity of the suggested named entity recognition and slot filling tasks as well as high annotation quality. We also present strong neural-network based models for a variety of tasks that can be addressed on the basis of our new data set. On all tasks, using BERT embeddings leads to large performance gains, but with increasing task complexity, adding a recurrent neural network on top seems beneficial. Our models will serve as competitive baselines in future work, and analysis of their performance highlights difficult cases when modeling the data and suggests promising research directions.

Large crowd-sourced datasets are often noisy and relation classification (RC) datasets are no exception. Reannotating the entire dataset is one probable solution however it is not always viable due to time and budget constraints. This paper addresses the problem of efficient reannotation of a large noisy dataset for the RC. Our goal is to catch more annotation errors in the dataset while reannotating fewer instances. Existing work on RC dataset reannotation lacks the flexibility about how much data to reannotate. We introduce the concept of a reannotation budget to overcome this limitation. The immediate follow-up problem is: Given a specific reannotation budget, which subset of the data should we reannotate? To address this problem, we present two strategies to selectively reannotate RC datasets. Our strategies utilize the taxonomic hierarchy of relation labels. The intuition of our work is to rely on the graph distance between actual and predicted relation labels in the label hierarchy graph. We evaluate our reannotation strategies on the well-known TACRED dataset. We design our experiments to answer three specific research questions. First, does our strategy select novel candidates for reannotation? Second, for a given reannotation budget is our reannotation strategy more efficient at catching annotation errors? Third, what is the impact of data reannotation on RC model performance measurement? Experimental results show that our both reannotation strategies are novel and efficient. Our analysis indicates that the current reported performance of RC models on noisy TACRED data is inflated.

Expression of sentiment in parliamentary debates is deemed to be significantly different from that on social media or in product reviews. This paper adds to an emerging body of research on parliamentary debates with a dataset of sentences annotated for detection sentiment polarity in political discourse. We sample the sentences for annotation from the proceedings of three Southeast European parliaments: Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia. A six-level schema is applied to the data with the aim of training a classification model for the detection of sentiment in parliamentary proceedings. Krippendorff's alpha measuring the inter-annotator agreement ranges from 0.6 for the six-level annotation schema to 0.75 for the three-level schema and 0.83 for the two-level schema. Our initial experiments on the dataset show that transformer models perform significantly better than those using a simpler architecture. Furthermore, regardless of the similarity of the three languages, we observe differences in performance across different languages. Performing parliament-specific training and evaluation shows that the main reason for the differing performance between parliaments seems to be the different complexity of the automatic classification task, which is not observable in annotator performance. Language distance does not seem to play any role neither in annotator nor in automatic classification performance. We release the dataset and the best-performing model under permissive licences.

Annotation quality is difficult to sustain when campaigns span weeks or months with small annotator pools. We present a Setswana sentiment dataset of 3,565 tweets annotated by three native-speaker annotators across eight batches and examine why inter-annotator agreement (IAA) declines over time. Despite an aggregate Randolph's free-marginal Kappa of κ= 0.76, "excellent," per-batch κ falls by more than 32 points across the annotation task. Through six targeted analyses, we find that (i) label confusion concentrates on the negative/neutral boundary, (ii) two annotators show run-length drift consistent with autopilot labeling, and (iii) the dominant predictor of κ is temporal simultaneity: tweets labeled within one minute achieve κ= 0.98, while those labeled more than a day apart reach only κ= 0.65. Annotation speed and tweet-level linguistic features show no meaningful association with κ. We benchmark three open multilingual encoders and proprietary models (GPT-5 and Gemini) on three-class sentiment classification; fine-tuning yields gains of 29 to 43 macro-F1 points over pretrained baselines, with GPT-5 few-shot leading overall (62.2 macro-F1). We release the dataset, per-annotation timestamps, and analysis code to support reproducible quality auditing for future African language NLP resources.

We introduce IndiaFinBench, to our knowledge the first publicly available evaluation benchmark for assessing large language model (LLM) performance on Indian financial regulatory text. Existing financial NLP benchmarks draw exclusively from Western financial corpora (SEC filings, US earnings reports, and English-language financial news), leaving a significant gap in coverage of non-Western regulatory frameworks. IndiaFinBench addresses this gap with 406 expert-annotated question-answer pairs drawn from 192 documents sourced from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), spanning four task types: regulatory interpretation (174 items), numerical reasoning (92 items), contradiction detection (62 items), and temporal reasoning (78 items). Annotation quality is validated through a model-based secondary pass (kappa=0.918 on contradiction detection) and a 60-item human inter-annotator agreement evaluation (kappa=0.611; 76.7% overall agreement). We evaluate twelve models under zero-shot conditions, with accuracy ranging from 70.4% (Gemma 4 E4B) to 89.7% (Gemini 2.5 Flash). All models substantially outperform a non-specialist human baseline of 60.0%. Numerical reasoning is the most discriminative task, with a 35.9 percentage-point spread across models. Bootstrap significance testing (10,000 resamples) reveals three statistically distinct performance tiers. The dataset, evaluation code, and all model outputs are available at https://github.com/rajveerpall/IndiaFinBench

Solving complex classification tasks using deep neural networks typically requires large amounts of annotated data. However, corresponding class labels are noisy when provided by error-prone annotators, e.g., crowd workers. Training standard deep neural networks leads to subpar performances in such multi-annotator supervised learning settings. We address this issue by presenting a probabilistic training framework named multi-annotator deep learning (MaDL). A ground truth and an annotator performance model are jointly trained in an end-to-end learning approach. The ground truth model learns to predict instances' true class labels, while the annotator performance model infers probabilistic estimates of annotators' performances. A modular network architecture enables us to make varying assumptions regarding annotators' performances, e.g., an optional class or instance dependency. Further, we learn annotator embeddings to estimate annotators' densities within a latent space as proxies of their potentially correlated annotations. Together with a weighted loss function, we improve the learning from correlated annotation patterns. In a comprehensive evaluation, we examine three research questions about multi-annotator supervised learning. Our findings indicate MaDL's state-of-the-art performance and robustness against many correlated, spamming annotators.

The transcriptional response to genetic perturbation reveals fundamental insights into complex cellular systems. While current approaches have made progress in predicting genetic perturbation responses, they provide limited biological understanding and cannot systematically refine existing knowledge. Overcoming these limitations requires an end-to-end integration of data-driven learning and existing knowledge. However, this integration is challenging due to inconsistencies between data and knowledge bases, such as noise, misannotation, and incompleteness. To address this challenge, we propose ALIGNED (Adaptive aLignment for Inconsistent Genetic kNowledgE and Data), a neuro-symbolic framework based on the Abductive Learning (ABL) paradigm. This end-to-end framework aligns neural and symbolic components and performs systematic knowledge refinement. We introduce a balanced consistency metric to evaluate the predictions' consistency against both data and knowledge. Our results show that ALIGNED outperforms state-of-the-art methods by achieving the highest balanced consistency, while also re-discovering biologically meaningful knowledge. Our work advances beyond existing methods to enable both the transparency and the evolution of mechanistic biological understanding.

When training data are collected from human annotators, the design of the annotation instrument, the instructions given to annotators, the characteristics of the annotators, and their interactions can impact training data. This study demonstrates that design choices made when creating an annotation instrument also impact the models trained on the resulting annotations. We introduce the term annotation sensitivity to refer to the impact of annotation data collection methods on the annotations themselves and on downstream model performance and predictions. We collect annotations of hate speech and offensive language in five experimental conditions of an annotation instrument, randomly assigning annotators to conditions. We then fine-tune BERT models on each of the five resulting datasets and evaluate model performance on a holdout portion of each condition. We find considerable differences between the conditions for 1) the share of hate speech/offensive language annotations, 2) model performance, 3) model predictions, and 4) model learning curves. Our results emphasize the crucial role played by the annotation instrument which has received little attention in the machine learning literature. We call for additional research into how and why the instrument impacts the annotations to inform the development of best practices in instrument design.

Data annotation is the labeling or tagging of raw data with relevant information, essential for improving the efficacy of machine learning models. The process, however, is labor-intensive and expensive. The emergence of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by GPT-4, presents an unprecedented opportunity to revolutionize and automate the intricate process of data annotation. While existing surveys have extensively covered LLM architecture, training, and general applications, this paper uniquely focuses on their specific utility for data annotation. This survey contributes to three core aspects: LLM-Based Data Annotation, Assessing LLM-generated Annotations, and Learning with LLM-generated annotations. Furthermore, the paper includes an in-depth taxonomy of methodologies employing LLMs for data annotation, a comprehensive review of learning strategies for models incorporating LLM-generated annotations, and a detailed discussion on primary challenges and limitations associated with using LLMs for data annotation. As a key guide, this survey aims to direct researchers and practitioners in exploring the potential of the latest LLMs for data annotation, fostering future advancements in this critical domain. We provide a comprehensive papers list at https://github.com/Zhen-Tan-dmml/LLM4Annotation.git.

Active learning algorithms automatically identify the most informative samples from large amounts of unlabeled data and tremendously reduce human annotation effort in inducing a machine learning model. In a conventional active learning setup, the labeling oracles are assumed to be infallible, that is, they always provide correct answers (in terms of class labels) to the queried unlabeled instances, which cannot be guaranteed in real-world applications. To this end, a body of research has focused on the development of active learning algorithms in the presence of imperfect / noisy oracles. Existing research on active learning with noisy oracles typically simulate the oracles using machine learning models; however, real-world situations are much more challenging, and using ML models to simulate the annotation patterns may not appropriately capture the nuances of real-world annotation challenges. In this research, we first collect annotations of text samples (from 3 benchmark text classification datasets) from crowd-sourced workers through a crowd-sourcing platform. We then conduct extensive empirical studies of 8 commonly used active learning techniques (in conjunction with deep neural networks) using the obtained annotations. Our analyses sheds light on the performance of these techniques under real-world challenges, where annotators can provide incorrect labels, and can also refuse to provide labels. We hope this research will provide valuable insights that will be useful for the deployment of deep active learning systems in real-world applications. The obtained annotations can be accessed at https://github.com/varuntotakura/al_rcta/.

Large language models (LLMs) are now widely used to evaluate the quality of text, a field commonly referred to as LLM-as-a-judge. While prior works mainly focus on point-wise and pair-wise evaluation paradigms. Rubric-based evaluation, where LLMs select a score from multiple rubrics, has received less analysis. In this work, we show that rubric-based evaluation implicitly resembles a multi-choice setting and therefore has position bias: LLMs prefer score options appearing at specific positions in the rubric list. Through controlled experiments across multiple models and datasets, we demonstrate consistent position bias. To mitigate this bias, we propose a balanced permutation strategy that evenly distributes each score option across positions. We show that aggregating scores across balanced permutations not only reveals latent position bias, but also improves correlation between the LLM-as-a-Judge and human. Our results suggest that rubric-based LLM-as-a-Judge is not inherently point-wise and that simple permutation-based calibration can substantially improve its reliability.

We present NUPunkt and CharBoundary, two sentence boundary detection libraries optimized for high-precision, high-throughput processing of legal text in large-scale applications such as due diligence, e-discovery, and legal research. These libraries address the critical challenges posed by legal documents containing specialized citations, abbreviations, and complex sentence structures that confound general-purpose sentence boundary detectors. Our experimental evaluation on five diverse legal datasets comprising over 25,000 documents and 197,000 annotated sentence boundaries demonstrates that NUPunkt achieves 91.1% precision while processing 10 million characters per second with modest memory requirements (432 MB). CharBoundary models offer balanced and adjustable precision-recall tradeoffs, with the large model achieving the highest F1 score (0.782) among all tested methods. Notably, NUPunkt provides a 29-32% precision improvement over general-purpose tools while maintaining exceptional throughput, processing multi-million document collections in minutes rather than hours. Both libraries run efficiently on standard CPU hardware without requiring specialized accelerators. NUPunkt is implemented in pure Python with zero external dependencies, while CharBoundary relies only on scikit-learn and optional ONNX runtime integration for optimized performance. Both libraries are available under the MIT license, can be installed via PyPI, and can be interactively tested at https://sentences.aleainstitute.ai/. These libraries address critical precision issues in retrieval-augmented generation systems by preserving coherent legal concepts across sentences, where each percentage improvement in precision yields exponentially greater reductions in context fragmentation, creating cascading benefits throughout retrieval pipelines and significantly enhancing downstream reasoning quality.

The Open Images Dataset contains approximately 9 million images and is a widely accepted dataset for computer vision research. As is common practice for large datasets, the annotations are not exhaustive, with bounding boxes and attribute labels for only a subset of the classes in each image. In this paper, we present a new set of annotations on a subset of the Open Images dataset called the MIAP (More Inclusive Annotations for People) subset, containing bounding boxes and attributes for all of the people visible in those images. The attributes and labeling methodology for the MIAP subset were designed to enable research into model fairness. In addition, we analyze the original annotation methodology for the person class and its subclasses, discussing the resulting patterns in order to inform future annotation efforts. By considering both the original and exhaustive annotation sets, researchers can also now study how systematic patterns in training annotations affect modeling.

Annotator disagreement is ubiquitous in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. There are multiple reasons for such disagreements, including the subjectivity of the task, difficult cases, unclear guidelines, and so on. Rather than simply aggregating labels to obtain data annotations, we instead try to directly model the diverse perspectives of the annotators, and explicitly account for annotators' idiosyncrasies in the modeling process by creating representations for each annotator (annotator embeddings) and also their annotations (annotation embeddings). In addition, we propose TID-8, The Inherent Disagreement - 8 dataset, a benchmark that consists of eight existing language understanding datasets that have inherent annotator disagreement. We test our approach on TID-8 and show that our approach helps models learn significantly better from disagreements on six different datasets in TID-8 while increasing model size by fewer than 1% parameters. By capturing the unique tendencies and subjectivity of individual annotators through embeddings, our representations prime AI models to be inclusive of diverse viewpoints.

This paper presents AI Wizards' participation in the CLEF 2025 CheckThat! Lab Task 1: Subjectivity Detection in News Articles, classifying sentences as subjective/objective in monolingual, multilingual, and zero-shot settings. Training/development datasets were provided for Arabic, German, English, Italian, and Bulgarian; final evaluation included additional unseen languages (e.g., Greek, Romanian, Polish, Ukrainian) to assess generalization. Our primary strategy enhanced transformer-based classifiers by integrating sentiment scores, derived from an auxiliary model, with sentence representations, aiming to improve upon standard fine-tuning. We explored this sentiment-augmented architecture with mDeBERTaV3-base, ModernBERT-base (English), and Llama3.2-1B. To address class imbalance, prevalent across languages, we employed decision threshold calibration optimized on the development set. Our experiments show sentiment feature integration significantly boosts performance, especially subjective F1 score. This framework led to high rankings, notably 1st for Greek (Macro F1 = 0.51).

Objective: To improve performance of medical entity normalization across many languages, especially when fewer language resources are available compared to English. Materials and Methods: We introduce xMEN, a modular system for cross-lingual medical entity normalization, which performs well in both low- and high-resource scenarios. When synonyms in the target language are scarce for a given terminology, we leverage English aliases via cross-lingual candidate generation. For candidate ranking, we incorporate a trainable cross-encoder model if annotations for the target task are available. We also evaluate cross-encoders trained in a weakly supervised manner based on machine-translated datasets from a high resource domain. Our system is publicly available as an extensible Python toolkit. Results: xMEN improves the state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of multilingual benchmark datasets. Weakly supervised cross-encoders are effective when no training data is available for the target task. Through the compatibility of xMEN with the BigBIO framework, it can be easily used with existing and prospective datasets. Discussion: Our experiments show the importance of balancing the output of general-purpose candidate generators with subsequent trainable re-rankers, which we achieve through a rank regularization term in the loss function of the cross-encoder. However, error analysis reveals that multi-word expressions and other complex entities are still challenging. Conclusion: xMEN exhibits strong performance for medical entity normalization in multiple languages, even when no labeled data and few terminology aliases for the target language are available. Its configuration system and evaluation modules enable reproducible benchmarks. Models and code are available online at the following URL: https://github.com/hpi-dhc/xmen

The HuggingFace Datasets Hub hosts thousands of datasets. This provides exciting opportunities for language model training and evaluation. However, the datasets for a given type of task are stored with different schemas, and harmonization is harder than it seems (https://xkcd.com/927/). Multi-task training or evaluation requires manual work to fit data into task templates. Various initiatives independently address this problem by releasing the harmonized datasets or harmonization codes to preprocess datasets to the same format. We identify patterns across previous preprocessings, e.g. mapping of column names, and extraction of a specific sub-field from structured data in a column, and propose a structured annotation framework that makes our annotations fully exposed and not buried in unstructured code. We release a dataset annotation framework and dataset annotations for more than 400 English tasks (https://github.com/sileod/tasksource). These annotations provide metadata, like the name of the columns that should be used as input or labels for all datasets, and can save time for future dataset preprocessings, even if they do not use our framework. We fine-tune a multi-task text encoder on all tasksource tasks, outperforming every publicly available text encoder of comparable size on an external evaluation https://hf.co/sileod/deberta-v3-base-tasksource-nli.

Detecting subjectivity in news sentences is crucial for identifying media bias, enhancing credibility, and combating misinformation by flagging opinion-based content. It provides insights into public sentiment, empowers readers to make informed decisions, and encourages critical thinking. While research has developed methods and systems for this purpose, most efforts have focused on English and other high-resourced languages. In this study, we present the first large dataset for subjectivity detection in Arabic, consisting of ~3.6K manually annotated sentences, and GPT-4o based explanation. In addition, we included instructions (both in English and Arabic) to facilitate LLM based fine-tuning. We provide an in-depth analysis of the dataset, annotation process, and extensive benchmark results, including PLMs and LLMs. Our analysis of the annotation process highlights that annotators were strongly influenced by their political, cultural, and religious backgrounds, especially at the beginning of the annotation process. The experimental results suggest that LLMs with in-context learning provide better performance. We aim to release the dataset and resources for the community.

Large language models (LLMs) offer an inexpensive yet powerful way to annotate text, but are often inconsistent when compared with experts. These errors can bias downstream estimates of population parameters such as regression coefficients and causal effects. To mitigate this bias, researchers have developed debiasing methods such as Design-based Supervised Learning (DSL) and Prediction-Powered Inference (PPI), which promise valid estimation by combining LLM annotations with a limited number of expensive expert annotations. Although these methods produce consistent estimates under theoretical assumptions, it is unknown how they compare in finite samples of sizes encountered in applied research. We make two contributions: First, we study how each method's performance scales with the number of expert annotations, highlighting regimes where LLM bias or limited expert labels significantly affect results. Second, we compare DSL and PPI across a range of tasks, finding that although both achieve low bias with large datasets, DSL often outperforms PPI on bias reduction and empirical efficiency, but its performance is less consistent across datasets. Our findings indicate that there is a bias-variance tradeoff at the level of debiasing methods, calling for more research on developing metrics for quantifying their efficiency in finite samples.

Annotated data plays a critical role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in training models and evaluating their performance. Given recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs), models such as ChatGPT demonstrate zero-shot capability on many text-annotation tasks, comparable with or even exceeding human annotators. Such LLMs can serve as alternatives for manual annotation, due to lower costs and higher scalability. However, limited work has leveraged LLMs as complementary annotators, nor explored how annotation work is best allocated among humans and LLMs to achieve both quality and cost objectives. We propose CoAnnotating, a novel paradigm for Human-LLM co-annotation of unstructured texts at scale. Under this framework, we utilize uncertainty to estimate LLMs' annotation capability. Our empirical study shows CoAnnotating to be an effective means to allocate work from results on different datasets, with up to 21% performance improvement over random baseline. For code implementation, see https://github.com/SALT-NLP/CoAnnotating.

While natural language processing tools have been developed extensively for some of the world's languages, a significant portion of the world's over 7000 languages are still neglected. One reason for this is that evaluation datasets do not yet cover a wide range of languages, including low-resource and endangered ones. We aim to address this issue by creating a text classification dataset encompassing a large number of languages, many of which currently have little to no annotated data available. We leverage parallel translations of the Bible to construct such a dataset by first developing applicable topics and employing a crowdsourcing tool to collect annotated data. By annotating the English side of the data and projecting the labels onto other languages through aligned verses, we generate text classification datasets for more than 1500 languages. We extensively benchmark several existing multilingual language models using our dataset. To facilitate the advancement of research in this area, we will release our dataset and code.

While fine-tuning pretrained models has become common practice, these models often underperform outside their specific domains. Recently developed model merging techniques enable the direct integration of multiple models, each fine-tuned for distinct tasks, into a single model. This strategy promotes multitasking capabilities without requiring retraining on the original datasets. However, existing methods fall short in addressing potential conflicts and complex correlations between tasks, especially in parameter-level adjustments, posing a challenge in effectively balancing parameter competition across various tasks. This paper introduces an innovative technique named PCB-Merging (Parameter Competition Balancing), a lightweight and training-free technique that adjusts the coefficients of each parameter for effective model merging. PCB-Merging employs intra-balancing to gauge parameter significance within individual tasks and inter-balancing to assess parameter similarities across different tasks. Parameters with low importance scores are dropped, and the remaining ones are rescaled to form the final merged model. We assessed our approach in diverse merging scenarios, including cross-task, cross-domain, and cross-training configurations, as well as out-of-domain generalization. The experimental results reveal that our approach achieves substantial performance enhancements across multiple modalities, domains, model sizes, number of tasks, fine-tuning forms, and large language models, outperforming existing model merging methods. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/duguodong7/pcb-merging.

A vital step towards the widespread adoption of neural retrieval models is their resource efficiency throughout the training, indexing and query workflows. The neural IR community made great advancements in training effective dual-encoder dense retrieval (DR) models recently. A dense text retrieval model uses a single vector representation per query and passage to score a match, which enables low-latency first stage retrieval with a nearest neighbor search. Increasingly common, training approaches require enormous compute power, as they either conduct negative passage sampling out of a continuously updating refreshing index or require very large batch sizes for in-batch negative sampling. Instead of relying on more compute capability, we introduce an efficient topic-aware query and balanced margin sampling technique, called TAS-Balanced. We cluster queries once before training and sample queries out of a cluster per batch. We train our lightweight 6-layer DR model with a novel dual-teacher supervision that combines pairwise and in-batch negative teachers. Our method is trainable on a single consumer-grade GPU in under 48 hours (as opposed to a common configuration of 8x V100s). We show that our TAS-Balanced training method achieves state-of-the-art low-latency (64ms per query) results on two TREC Deep Learning Track query sets. Evaluated on NDCG@10, we outperform BM25 by 44%, a plainly trained DR by 19%, docT5query by 11%, and the previous best DR model by 5%. Additionally, TAS-Balanced produces the first dense retriever that outperforms every other method on recall at any cutoff on TREC-DL and allows more resource intensive re-ranking models to operate on fewer passages to improve results further.

Many recent approaches to natural language tasks are built on the remarkable abilities of large language models. Large language models can perform in-context learning, where they learn a new task from a few task demonstrations, without any parameter updates. This work examines the implications of in-context learning for the creation of datasets for new natural language tasks. Departing from recent in-context learning methods, we formulate an annotation-efficient, two-step framework: selective annotation that chooses a pool of examples to annotate from unlabeled data in advance, followed by prompt retrieval that retrieves task examples from the annotated pool at test time. Based on this framework, we propose an unsupervised, graph-based selective annotation method, voke-k, to select diverse, representative examples to annotate. Extensive experiments on 10 datasets (covering classification, commonsense reasoning, dialogue, and text/code generation) demonstrate that our selective annotation method improves the task performance by a large margin. On average, vote-k achieves a 12.9%/11.4% relative gain under an annotation budget of 18/100, as compared to randomly selecting examples to annotate. Compared to state-of-the-art supervised finetuning approaches, it yields similar performance with 10-100x less annotation cost across 10 tasks. We further analyze the effectiveness of our framework in various scenarios: language models with varying sizes, alternative selective annotation methods, and cases where there is a test data domain shift. We hope that our studies will serve as a basis for data annotations as large language models are increasingly applied to new tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUNLP/icl-selective-annotation.

Language models (LMs) have gained great achievement in various NLP tasks for both fine-tuning and in-context learning (ICL) methods. Despite its outstanding performance, evidence shows that spurious correlations caused by imbalanced label distributions in training data (or exemplars in ICL) lead to robustness issues. However, previous studies mostly focus on word- and phrase-level features and fail to tackle it from the concept level, partly due to the lack of concept labels and subtle and diverse expressions of concepts in text. In this paper, we first use the LLM to label the concept for each text and then measure the concept bias of models for fine-tuning or ICL on the test data. Second, we propose a data rebalancing method to mitigate the spurious correlations by adding the LLM-generated counterfactual data to make a balanced label distribution for each concept. We verify the effectiveness of our mitigation method and show its superiority over the token removal method. Overall, our results show that there exist label distribution biases in concepts across multiple text classification datasets, and LMs will utilize these shortcuts to make predictions in both fine-tuning and ICL methods.

Open community-driven platforms like Chatbot Arena that collect user preference data from site visitors have gained a reputation as one of the most trustworthy publicly available benchmarks for LLM performance. While now standard, it is tricky to implement effective guardrails to collect high-quality annotations from humans. In this paper, we demonstrate that three sources of bad annotations, both malicious and otherwise, can corrupt the reliability of open leaderboard rankings. In particular, we show that only 10\% of poor quality votes by apathetic (site visitors not appropriately incentivized to give correct votes) or adversarial (bad actors seeking to inflate the ranking of a target model) annotators can change the rankings of models by up to 5 places on the leaderboard. Finally, we discuss open challenges in ensuring high-quality human annotations.

High-quality and consistent annotations are fundamental to the successful development of robust machine learning models. Traditional data annotation methods are resource-intensive and inefficient, often leading to a reliance on third-party annotators who are not the domain experts. Hard samples, which are usually the most informative for model training, tend to be difficult to label accurately and consistently without business context. These can arise unpredictably during the annotation process, requiring a variable number of iterations and rounds of feedback, leading to unforeseen expenses and time commitments to guarantee quality. We posit that more direct involvement of domain experts, using a human-in-the-loop system, can resolve many of these practical challenges. We propose a novel framework we call Video Annotator (VA) for annotating, managing, and iterating on video classification datasets. Our approach offers a new paradigm for an end-user-centered model development process, enhancing the efficiency, usability, and effectiveness of video classifiers. Uniquely, VA allows for a continuous annotation process, seamlessly integrating data collection and model training. We leverage the zero-shot capabilities of vision-language foundation models combined with active learning techniques, and demonstrate that VA enables the efficient creation of high-quality models. VA achieves a median 6.8 point improvement in Average Precision relative to the most competitive baseline across a wide-ranging assortment of tasks. We release a dataset with 153k labels across 56 video understanding tasks annotated by three professional video editors using VA, and also release code to replicate our experiments at: http://github.com/netflix/videoannotator.

Aspect sentiment quadruple prediction (ASQP) facilitates a detailed understanding of opinions expressed in a text by identifying the opinion term, aspect term, aspect category and sentiment polarity for each opinion. However, annotating a full set of training examples to fine-tune models for ASQP is a resource-intensive process. In this study, we explore the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for zero- and few-shot learning on the ASQP task across five diverse datasets. We report F1 scores slightly below those obtained with state-of-the-art fine-tuned models but exceeding previously reported zero- and few-shot performance. In the 40-shot setting on the Rest16 restaurant domain dataset, LLMs achieved an F1 score of 52.46, compared to 60.39 by the best-performing fine-tuned method MVP. Additionally, we report the performance of LLMs in target aspect sentiment detection (TASD), where the F1 scores were also close to fine-tuned models, achieving 66.03 on Rest16 in the 40-shot setting, compared to 72.76 with MVP. While human annotators remain essential for achieving optimal performance, LLMs can reduce the need for extensive manual annotation in ASQP tasks.

Since FineWeb-Edu, data curation for LLM pretraining has predominantly relied on single scalar quality scores produced by small classifiers. A single score conflates multiple quality dimensions, prevents flexible filtering, and offers no interpretability. We introduce propella-1, a family of small multilingual LLMs (0.6B, 1.7B, 4B parameters) that annotate text documents across 18 properties organized into six categories: core content, classification, quality and value, audience and purpose, safety and compliance, and geographic relevance. The models support 57 languages and produce structured JSON annotations conforming to a predefined schema. Evaluated against a frontier commercial LLM as a reference annotator, the 4B model achieves higher agreement than much larger general-purpose models. We release propella-annotations, a dataset of over three billion document annotations covering major pretraining corpora including data from FineWeb-2, FinePDFs, HPLT 3.0, and Nemotron-CC. Using these annotations, we present a multi-dimensional compositional analysis of widely used pretraining datasets, revealing substantial differences in quality, reasoning depth, and content composition that single-score approaches cannot capture. All model weights and annotations are released under permissive, commercial-use licenses.

The advancement of machine learning algorithms in medical image analysis requires the expansion of training datasets. A popular and cost-effective approach is automated annotation extraction from free-text medical reports, primarily due to the high costs associated with expert clinicians annotating medical images, such as chest X-rays. However, it has been shown that the resulting datasets are susceptible to biases and shortcuts. Another strategy to increase the size of a dataset is crowdsourcing, a widely adopted practice in general computer vision with some success in medical image analysis. In a similar vein to crowdsourcing, we enhance two publicly available chest X-ray datasets by incorporating non-expert annotations. However, instead of using diagnostic labels, we annotate shortcuts in the form of tubes. We collect 3.5k chest drain annotations for NIH-CXR14, and 1k annotations for four different tube types in PadChest, and create the Non-Expert Annotations of Tubes in X-rays (NEATX) dataset. We train a chest drain detector with the non-expert annotations that generalizes well to expert labels. Moreover, we compare our annotations to those provided by experts and show "moderate" to "almost perfect" agreement. Finally, we present a pathology agreement study to raise awareness about the quality of ground truth annotations. We make our dataset available on Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/records/14944064 and our code available at https://github.com/purrlab/chestxr-label-reliability.

Real-world data for classification is often labeled by multiple annotators. For analyzing such data, we introduce CROWDLAB, a straightforward approach to utilize any trained classifier to estimate: (1) A consensus label for each example that aggregates the available annotations; (2) A confidence score for how likely each consensus label is correct; (3) A rating for each annotator quantifying the overall correctness of their labels. Existing algorithms to estimate related quantities in crowdsourcing often rely on sophisticated generative models with iterative inference. CROWDLAB instead uses a straightforward weighted ensemble. Existing algorithms often rely solely on annotator statistics, ignoring the features of the examples from which the annotations derive. CROWDLAB utilizes any classifier model trained on these features, and can thus better generalize between examples with similar features. On real-world multi-annotator image data, our proposed method provides superior estimates for (1)-(3) than existing algorithms like Dawid-Skene/GLAD.

Preference optimization is a standard approach to fine-tuning large language models to align with human preferences. The quality, diversity, and quantity of the preference dataset are critical to the effectiveness of preference optimization. However, obtaining a large amount of high-quality and diverse preference annotations is difficult in many applications. This raises the question of how to use the limited annotation budget to create an effective preference dataset. To this end, we propose Annotation-Efficient Preference Optimization (AEPO). Instead of exhaustively annotating preference over all available response texts, AEPO selects a subset of responses that maximizes quality and diversity from the available responses, and then annotates preference over the selected ones. In this way, AEPO focuses the annotation budget on labeling preference over a smaller subset of responses with diversity and of high quality. We evaluate the performance of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) using AEPO and show that it outperforms models trained using a standard DPO with the same annotation budget. Our code is available at https://github.com/CyberAgentAILab/annotation-efficient-po

Class imbalance in binary classification tasks remains a significant challenge in machine learning, often resulting in poor performance on minority classes. This study comprehensively evaluates three widely-used strategies for handling class imbalance: Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE), Class Weights tuning, and Decision Threshold Calibration. We compare these methods against a baseline scenario of no-intervention across 15 diverse machine learning models and 30 datasets from various domains, conducting a total of 9,000 experiments. Performance was primarily assessed using the F1-score, although our study also tracked results on additional 9 metrics including F2-score, precision, recall, Brier-score, PR-AUC, and AUC. Our results indicate that all three strategies generally outperform the baseline, with Decision Threshold Calibration emerging as the most consistently effective technique. However, we observed substantial variability in the best-performing method across datasets, highlighting the importance of testing multiple approaches for specific problems. This study provides valuable insights for practitioners dealing with imbalanced datasets and emphasizes the need for dataset-specific analysis in evaluating class imbalance handling techniques.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in empirical software engineering (ESE) to automate or assist annotation tasks such as labeling commits, issues, and qualitative artifacts. Yet the reliability and reproducibility of such annotations remain underexplored. Existing studies often lack standardized measures for reliability, calibration, and drift, and frequently omit essential configuration details. We argue that LLM-based annotation should be treated as a measurement process rather than a purely automated activity. In this position paper, we outline the Operationalization for LLM-based Annotation Framework (OLAF), a conceptual framework that organizes key constructs: reliability, calibration, drift, consensus, aggregation, and transparency. The paper aims to motivate methodological discussion and future empirical work toward more transparent and reproducible LLM-based annotation in software engineering research.

User specifications or legal frameworks often require information to be removed from pretrained models, including large language models (LLMs). This requires deleting or "forgetting" a set of data points from an already-trained model, which typically degrades its performance on other data points. Thus, a balance must be struck between removing information and keeping the model's other abilities intact, with a failure to balance this trade-off leading to poor deletion or an unusable model. To this end, we propose UPCORE (Utility-Preserving Coreset Selection), a method-agnostic data selection framework for mitigating collateral damage during unlearning. Finding that the model damage is correlated with the variance of the model's representations on the forget set, we selectively prune the forget set to remove outliers, thereby minimizing model degradation after unlearning. We evaluate UPCORE across three standard unlearning methods consistently achieving a superior balance between the competing objectives of deletion efficacy and model preservation. To better evaluate this trade-off, we introduce a new metric, measuring the area-under-the-curve (AUC) across standard metrics. We find that UPCORE improves both standard metrics and AUC, benefitting from positive transfer between the coreset and pruned points while reducing negative transfer from the forget set to points outside of it.

We introduce a novel Image Quality Assessment (IQA) dataset comprising 6073 UHD-1 (4K) images, annotated at a fixed width of 3840 pixels. Contrary to existing No-Reference (NR) IQA datasets, ours focuses on highly aesthetic photos of high technical quality, filling a gap in the literature. The images, carefully curated to exclude synthetic content, are sufficiently diverse to train general NR-IQA models. Importantly, the dataset is annotated with perceptual quality ratings obtained through a crowdsourcing study. Ten expert raters, comprising photographers and graphics artists, assessed each image at least twice in multiple sessions spanning several days, resulting in 20 highly reliable ratings per image. Annotators were rigorously selected based on several metrics, including self-consistency, to ensure their reliability. The dataset includes rich metadata with user and machine-generated tags from over 5,000 categories and popularity indicators such as favorites, likes, downloads, and views. With its unique characteristics, such as its focus on high-quality images, reliable crowdsourced annotations, and high annotation resolution, our dataset opens up new opportunities for advancing perceptual image quality assessment research and developing practical NR-IQA models that apply to modern photos. Our dataset is available at https://database.mmsp-kn.de/uhd-iqa-benchmark-database.html

Design biases in NLP systems, such as performance differences for different populations, often stem from their creator's positionality, i.e., views and lived experiences shaped by identity and background. Despite the prevalence and risks of design biases, they are hard to quantify because researcher, system, and dataset positionality is often unobserved. We introduce NLPositionality, a framework for characterizing design biases and quantifying the positionality of NLP datasets and models. Our framework continuously collects annotations from a diverse pool of volunteer participants on LabintheWild, and statistically quantifies alignment with dataset labels and model predictions. We apply NLPositionality to existing datasets and models for two tasks -- social acceptability and hate speech detection. To date, we have collected 16,299 annotations in over a year for 600 instances from 1,096 annotators across 87 countries. We find that datasets and models align predominantly with Western, White, college-educated, and younger populations. Additionally, certain groups, such as non-binary people and non-native English speakers, are further marginalized by datasets and models as they rank least in alignment across all tasks. Finally, we draw from prior literature to discuss how researchers can examine their own positionality and that of their datasets and models, opening the door for more inclusive NLP systems.

Conventional multi-label classification (MLC) methods assume that all samples are fully labeled and identically distributed. Unfortunately, this assumption is unrealistic in large-scale MLC data that has long-tailed (LT) distribution and partial labels (PL). To address the problem, we introduce a novel task, Partial labeling and Long-Tailed Multi-Label Classification (PLT-MLC), to jointly consider the above two imperfect learning environments. Not surprisingly, we find that most LT-MLC and PL-MLC approaches fail to solve the PLT-MLC, resulting in significant performance degradation on the two proposed PLT-MLC benchmarks. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end learning framework: COrrection rightarrow ModificatIon rightarrow balanCe, abbreviated as \method{}. Our bootstrapping philosophy is to simultaneously correct the missing labels (Correction) with convinced prediction confidence over a class-aware threshold and to learn from these recall labels during training. We next propose a novel multi-focal modifier loss that simultaneously addresses head-tail imbalance and positive-negative imbalance to adaptively modify the attention to different samples (Modification) under the LT class distribution. In addition, we develop a balanced training strategy by distilling the model's learning effect from head and tail samples, and thus design a balanced classifier (Balance) conditioned on the head and tail learning effect to maintain stable performance for all samples. Our experimental study shows that the proposed significantly outperforms general MLC, LT-MLC and PL-MLC methods in terms of effectiveness and robustness on our newly created PLT-MLC datasets.

Achieving balanced alignment of large language models (LLMs) in terms of Helpfulness, Honesty, and Harmlessness (3H optimization) constitutes a cornerstone of responsible AI, with existing methods like data mixture strategies facing limitations including reliance on expert knowledge and conflicting optimization signals. While model merging offers a promising alternative by integrating specialized models, its potential for 3H optimization remains underexplored. This paper establishes the first comprehensive benchmark for model merging in 3H-aligned LLMs, systematically evaluating 15 methods (12 training-free merging and 3 data mixture techniques) across 10 datasets associated with 5 annotation dimensions, 2 LLM families, and 2 training paradigms. Our analysis reveals three pivotal insights: (i) previously overlooked collaborative/conflicting relationships among 3H dimensions, (ii) the consistent superiority of model merging over data mixture approaches in balancing alignment trade-offs, and (iii) the critical role of parameter-level conflict resolution through redundant component pruning and outlier mitigation. Building on these findings, we propose R-TSVM, a Reweighting-enhanced Task Singular Vector Merging method that incorporates outlier-aware parameter weighting and sparsity-adaptive rank selection strategies adapted to the heavy-tailed parameter distribution and sparsity for LLMs, further improving LLM alignment across multiple evaluations. We release our trained models for further exploration.

Moral sentiments expressed in natural language significantly influence both online and offline environments, shaping behavioral styles and interaction patterns, including social media selfpresentation, cyberbullying, adherence to social norms, and ethical decision-making. To effectively measure moral sentiments in natural language processing texts, it is crucial to utilize large, annotated datasets that provide nuanced understanding for accurate analysis and modeltraining. However, existing corpora, while valuable, often face linguistic limitations. To address this gap in the Chinese language domain,we introduce the Moral Foundation Weibo Corpus. This corpus consists of 25,671 Chinese comments on Weibo, encompassing six diverse topic areas. Each comment is manually annotated by at least three systematically trained annotators based on ten moral categories derived from a grounded theory of morality. To assess annotator reliability, we present the kappa testresults, a gold standard for measuring consistency. Additionally, we apply several the latest large language models to supplement the manual annotations, conducting analytical experiments to compare their performance and report baseline results for moral sentiment classification.

The task of annotating data into concise summaries poses a significant challenge across various domains, frequently requiring the allocation of significant time and specialized knowledge by human experts. Despite existing efforts to use large language models for annotation tasks, significant problems such as limited applicability to unlabeled data, the absence of self-supervised methods, and the lack of focus on complex structured data still persist. In this work, we propose a GPT self-supervision annotation method, which embodies a generating-recovering paradigm that leverages the one-shot learning capabilities of the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT). The proposed approach comprises a one-shot tuning phase followed by a generation phase. In the one-shot tuning phase, we sample a data from the support set as part of the prompt for GPT to generate a textual summary, which is then used to recover the original data. The alignment score between the recovered and original data serves as a self-supervision navigator to refine the process. In the generation stage, the optimally selected one-shot sample serves as a template in the prompt and is applied to generating summaries from challenging datasets. The annotation performance is evaluated by tuning several human feedback reward networks and by calculating alignment scores between original and recovered data at both sentence and structure levels. Our self-supervised annotation method consistently achieves competitive scores, convincingly demonstrating its robust strength in various data-to-summary annotation tasks.

Detecting disclosures of individuals' employment status on social media can provide valuable information to match job seekers with suitable vacancies, offer social protection, or measure labor market flows. However, identifying such personal disclosures is a challenging task due to their rarity in a sea of social media content and the variety of linguistic forms used to describe them. Here, we examine three Active Learning (AL) strategies in real-world settings of extreme class imbalance, and identify five types of disclosures about individuals' employment status (e.g. job loss) in three languages using BERT-based classification models. Our findings show that, even under extreme imbalance settings, a small number of AL iterations is sufficient to obtain large and significant gains in precision, recall, and diversity of results compared to a supervised baseline with the same number of labels. We also find that no AL strategy consistently outperforms the rest. Qualitative analysis suggests that AL helps focus the attention mechanism of BERT on core terms and adjust the boundaries of semantic expansion, highlighting the importance of interpretable models to provide greater control and visibility into this dynamic learning process.

Recognition problems in long-tailed data, in which the sample size per class is heavily skewed, have gained importance because the distribution of the sample size per class in a dataset is generally exponential unless the sample size is intentionally adjusted. Various methods have been devised to address these problems. Recently, weight balancing, which combines well-known classical regularization techniques with two-stage training, has been proposed. Despite its simplicity, it is known for its high performance compared with existing methods devised in various ways. However, there is a lack of understanding as to why this method is effective for long-tailed data. In this study, we analyze weight balancing by focusing on neural collapse and the cone effect at each training stage and found that it can be decomposed into an increase in Fisher's discriminant ratio of the feature extractor caused by weight decay and cross entropy loss and implicit logit adjustment caused by weight decay and class-balanced loss. Our analysis enables the training method to be further simplified by reducing the number of training stages to one while increasing accuracy.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has brought a critical need for high-quality human-labeled data, particularly for processes like human feedback and evaluation. A common practice is to label data via consensus annotation over crowdworker judgments. However, annotators' judgments for subjective tasks can differ in many ways: they may have different qualitative judgments about an example, and they may map those to a labeling scheme in different ways. We show that these nuances can be captured by natural language explanations, and propose a method to rescale ordinal annotations and explanations using LLMs. Specifically, we feed annotators' Likert ratings and corresponding explanations into an LLM and prompt it to produce a numeric score anchored in a scoring rubric. These scores should reflect the annotators' underlying assessments of the example. The rubric can be designed or modified after annotation, and include distinctions that may not have been known when the original error taxonomy was devised. We explore our technique in the context of rating system outputs for a document-grounded question answering task, where LLMs achieve near-human performance. Our method rescales the raw judgments without impacting agreement and brings the scores closer to human judgments grounded in the same scoring rubric.

Data annotation is an essential step for constructing new datasets. However, the conventional approach of data annotation through crowdsourcing is both time-consuming and expensive. In addition, the complexity of this process increases when dealing with low-resource languages owing to the difference in the language pool of crowdworkers. To address these issues, this study proposes an autonomous annotation method by utilizing large language models, which have been recently demonstrated to exhibit remarkable performance. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method is not just cost-efficient but also applicable for low-resource language annotation. Additionally, we constructed an image captioning dataset using our approach and are committed to open this dataset for future study. We have opened our source code for further study and reproducibility.

We introduce the AnnoPage Dataset, a novel collection of 7550 pages from historical documents, primarily in Czech and German, spanning from 1485 to the present, focusing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The dataset is designed to support research in document layout analysis and object detection. Each page is annotated with axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABB) representing elements of 25 categories of non-textual elements, such as images, maps, decorative elements, or charts, following the Czech Methodology of image document processing. The annotations were created by expert librarians to ensure accuracy and consistency. The dataset also incorporates pages from multiple, mainly historical, document datasets to enhance variability and maintain continuity. The dataset is divided into development and test subsets, with the test set carefully selected to maintain the category distribution. We provide baseline results using YOLO and DETR object detectors, offering a reference point for future research. The AnnoPage Dataset is publicly available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12788419), along with ground-truth annotations in YOLO format.

We introduce Biomed-Enriched, a biomedical text dataset constructed from PubMed via a two-stage annotation process. In the first stage, a large language model annotates 400K paragraphs from PubMed scientific articles, assigning scores for their type (review, study, clinical case, other), domain (clinical, biomedical, other), and educational quality. The educational quality score (rated 1 to 5) estimates how useful a paragraph is for college-level learning. These annotations are then used to fine-tune a small language model, which propagates the labels across the full PMC-OA corpus. The resulting metadata allows us to extract refined subsets, including 2M clinical case paragraphs with over 450K high-quality ones from articles with commercial-use licenses, and to construct several variants via quality filtering and domain upsampling. Clinical text is typically difficult to access due to privacy constraints, as hospital records cannot be publicly shared. Hence, our dataset provides an alternative large-scale, openly available collection of clinical cases from PubMed, making it a valuable resource for biomedical and clinical NLP. Preliminary continual-pretraining experiments with OLMo2 suggest these curated subsets enable targeted improvements, with clinical upsampling boosting performance by ~5% on MMLU ProfMed and educational quality filtering improving MedQA and MedMCQA by ~1%. Combinations of these techniques led to faster convergence, reaching same performance with a third of training tokens, indicating potential for more efficient and effective biomedical pretraining strategies.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intents critically involves the use of human or AI feedback. While dense feedback annotations are expensive to acquire and integrate, sparse feedback presents a structural design choice between ratings (e.g., score Response A on a scale of 1-7) and rankings (e.g., is Response A better than Response B?). In this work, we analyze the effect of this design choice for the alignment and evaluation of LLMs. We uncover an inconsistency problem wherein the preferences inferred from ratings and rankings significantly disagree 60% for both human and AI annotators. Our subsequent analysis identifies various facets of annotator biases that explain this phenomena, such as human annotators would rate denser responses higher while preferring accuracy during pairwise judgments. To our surprise, we also observe that the choice of feedback protocol also has a significant effect on the evaluation of aligned LLMs. In particular, we find that LLMs that leverage rankings data for alignment (say model X) are preferred over those that leverage ratings data (say model Y), with a rank-based evaluation protocol (is X/Y's response better than reference response?) but not with a rating-based evaluation protocol (score Rank X/Y's response on a scale of 1-7). Our findings thus shed light on critical gaps in methods for evaluating the real-world utility of language models and their strong dependence on the feedback protocol used for alignment. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Hritikbansal/sparse_feedback.

While annotated corpora are crucial in the field of natural language processing (NLP), those containing copyrighted material are difficult to exchange among researchers. Yet, such corpora are necessary to fully represent the diversity of data found in the wild in the context of NLP tasks. We tackle this issue by proposing a method to lawfully and publicly share the annotations of copyrighted literary texts. The corpus creator shares the annotations in clear, along with a non-reversible hashed version of the source material. The corpus user must own the source material, and apply the same hash function to their own tokens, in order to match them to the shared annotations. Crucially, our method is robust to reasonable divergences in the version of the copyrighted data owned by the user. As an illustration, we present alignment experiments on different editions of novels. Our results show that our method is able to correctly align 98.7 to 99.79% of tokens depending on the novel, provided the user version is sufficiently close to the corpus creator's version. We publicly release novelshare, a Python implementation of our method.

For the purpose of efficient and cost-effective large-scale data labeling, crowdsourcing is increasingly being utilized. To guarantee the quality of data labeling, multiple annotations need to be collected for each data sample, and truth inference algorithms have been developed to accurately infer the true labels. Despite previous studies having released public datasets to evaluate the efficacy of truth inference algorithms, these have typically focused on a single type of crowdsourcing task and neglected the temporal information associated with workers' annotation activities. These limitations significantly restrict the practical applicability of these algorithms, particularly in the context of long-term and online truth inference. In this paper, we introduce a substantial crowdsourcing annotation dataset collected from a real-world crowdsourcing platform. This dataset comprises approximately two thousand workers, one million tasks, and six million annotations. The data was gathered over a period of approximately six months from various types of tasks, and the timestamps of each annotation were preserved. We analyze the characteristics of the dataset from multiple perspectives and evaluate the effectiveness of several representative truth inference algorithms on this dataset. We anticipate that this dataset will stimulate future research on tracking workers' abilities over time in relation to different types of tasks, as well as enhancing online truth inference.

In-context learning is a promising paradigm that utilizes in-context examples as prompts for the predictions of large language models. These prompts are crucial for achieving strong performance. However, since the prompts need to be sampled from a large volume of annotated examples, finding the right prompt may result in high annotation costs. To address this challenge, this paper introduces an influence-driven selective annotation method that aims to minimize annotation costs while improving the quality of in-context examples. The essence of our method is to select a pivotal subset from a large-scale unlabeled data pool to annotate for the subsequent sampling of prompts. Specifically, a directed graph is first constructed to represent unlabeled data. Afterward, the influence of candidate unlabeled subsets is quantified with a diffusion process. A simple yet effective greedy algorithm for unlabeled data selection is lastly introduced. It iteratively selects the data if it provides a maximum marginal gain with respect to quantified influence. Compared with previous efforts on selective annotations, our influence-driven method works in an end-to-end manner, avoids an intractable explicit balance between data diversity and representativeness, and enjoys theoretical support. Experiments confirm the superiority of the proposed method on various benchmarks, achieving better performance under lower time consumption during subset selection. The project page is available at https://skzhang1.github.io/IDEAL/.

Model customization necessitates high-quality and diverse datasets, but acquiring such data remains time-consuming and labor-intensive. Despite the great potential of large language models (LLMs) for data synthesis, current approaches are constrained by limited seed data, model biases, and low-variation prompts, resulting in limited diversity and biased distributions with the increase of data scales. To tackle this challenge, we introduce TREESYNTH, a tree-guided subspace-based data synthesis approach inspired by decision trees. It constructs a spatial partitioning tree to recursively divide a task-specific full data space (i.e., root node) into numerous atomic subspaces (i.e., leaf nodes) with mutually exclusive and exhaustive attributes to ensure both distinctiveness and comprehensiveness before synthesizing samples within each atomic subspace. This globally dividing-and-synthesizing method finally collects subspace samples into a comprehensive dataset, effectively circumventing repetition and space collapse to ensure the diversity of large-scale data synthesis. Furthermore, the spatial partitioning tree enables sample allocation into atomic subspaces, allowing the rebalancing of existing datasets for more balanced and comprehensive distributions. Empirically, extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks consistently demonstrate the superior data diversity, model performance, and robust scalability of TREESYNTH compared to both human-crafted datasets and peer data synthesis methods, with an average performance gain reaching 10%. Besides, the consistent improvements of TREESYNTH-balanced datasets highlight its efficacious application to redistribute existing datasets for more comprehensive coverage and the induced performance enhancement. The code is available at https://github.com/cpa2001/TreeSynth.

Researchers have proposed numerous text-to-SQL techniques to streamline data analytics and accelerate the development of data-driven applications. To compare these techniques and select the best one for deployment, the community depends on public benchmarks and their leaderboards. Since these benchmarks heavily rely on human annotations during question construction and answer evaluation, the validity of the annotations is crucial. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study that (i) benchmarks annotation error rates for two widely used text-to-SQL benchmarks, BIRD and Spider 2.0-Snow, and (ii) corrects a subset of the BIRD development (Dev) set to measure the impact of annotation errors on text-to-SQL agent performance and leaderboard rankings. Through expert analysis, we show that BIRD Mini-Dev and Spider 2.0-Snow have error rates of 52.8% and 62.8%, respectively. We re-evaluate all 16 open-source agents from the BIRD leaderboard on both the original and the corrected BIRD Dev subsets. We show that performance changes range from -7% to 31% (in relative terms) and rank changes range from -9 to +9 positions. We further assess whether these impacts generalize to the full BIRD Dev set. We find that the rankings of agents on the uncorrected subset correlate strongly with those on the full Dev set (Spearman's r_s=0.85, p=3.26e-5), whereas they correlate weakly with those on the corrected subset (Spearman's r_s=0.32, p=0.23). These findings show that annotation errors can significantly distort reported performance and rankings, potentially misguiding research directions or deployment choices. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/uiuc-kang-lab/text_to_sql_benchmarks.

People often utilise online media (e.g., Facebook, Reddit) as a platform to express their psychological distress and seek support. State-of-the-art NLP techniques demonstrate strong potential to automatically detect mental health issues from text. Research suggests that mental health issues are reflected in emotions (e.g., sadness) indicated in a person's choice of language. Therefore, we developed a novel emotion-annotated mental health corpus (EmoMent), consisting of 2802 Facebook posts (14845 sentences) extracted from two South Asian countries - Sri Lanka and India. Three clinical psychology postgraduates were involved in annotating these posts into eight categories, including 'mental illness' (e.g., depression) and emotions (e.g., 'sadness', 'anger'). EmoMent corpus achieved 'very good' inter-annotator agreement of 98.3% (i.e. % with two or more agreement) and Fleiss' Kappa of 0.82. Our RoBERTa based models achieved an F1 score of 0.76 and a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.77 for the first task (i.e. predicting a mental health condition from a post) and the second task (i.e. extent of association of relevant posts with the categories defined in our taxonomy), respectively.

We introduce CheckEval, a novel evaluation framework using Large Language Models, addressing the challenges of ambiguity and inconsistency in current evaluation methods. CheckEval addresses these challenges by dividing evaluation criteria into detailed sub-aspects and constructing a checklist of Boolean questions for each, simplifying the evaluation. This approach not only renders the process more interpretable but also significantly enhances the robustness and reliability of results by focusing on specific evaluation dimensions. Validated through a focused case study using the SummEval benchmark, CheckEval indicates a strong correlation with human judgments. Furthermore, it demonstrates a highly consistent Inter-Annotator Agreement. These findings highlight the effectiveness of CheckEval for objective, flexible, and precise evaluations. By offering a customizable and interactive framework, CheckEval sets a new standard for the use of LLMs in evaluation, responding to the evolving needs of the field and establishing a clear method for future LLM-based evaluation.

Monolingual word alignment is crucial to model semantic interactions between sentences. In particular, null alignment, a phenomenon in which words have no corresponding counterparts, is pervasive and critical in handling semantically divergent sentences. Identification of null alignment is useful on its own to reason about the semantic similarity of sentences by indicating there exists information inequality. To achieve unbalanced word alignment that values both alignment and null alignment, this study shows that the family of optimal transport (OT), i.e., balanced, partial, and unbalanced OT, are natural and powerful approaches even without tailor-made techniques. Our extensive experiments covering unsupervised and supervised settings indicate that our generic OT-based alignment methods are competitive against the state-of-the-arts specially designed for word alignment, remarkably on challenging datasets with high null alignment frequencies.

We present MahaSTS, a human-annotated Sentence Textual Similarity (STS) dataset for Marathi, along with MahaSBERT-STS-v2, a fine-tuned Sentence-BERT model optimized for regression-based similarity scoring. The MahaSTS dataset consists of 16,860 Marathi sentence pairs labeled with continuous similarity scores in the range of 0-5. To ensure balanced supervision, the dataset is uniformly distributed across six score-based buckets spanning the full 0-5 range, thus reducing label bias and enhancing model stability. We fine-tune the MahaSBERT model on this dataset and benchmark its performance against other alternatives like MahaBERT, MuRIL, IndicBERT, and IndicSBERT. Our experiments demonstrate that MahaSTS enables effective training for sentence similarity tasks in Marathi, highlighting the impact of human-curated annotations, targeted fine-tuning, and structured supervision in low-resource settings. The dataset and model are publicly shared at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/MarathiNLP

We present an overview of the FIGNEWS shared task, organized as part of the ArabicNLP 2024 conference co-located with ACL 2024. The shared task addresses bias and propaganda annotation in multilingual news posts. We focus on the early days of the Israel War on Gaza as a case study. The task aims to foster collaboration in developing annotation guidelines for subjective tasks by creating frameworks for analyzing diverse narratives highlighting potential bias and propaganda. In a spirit of fostering and encouraging diversity, we address the problem from a multilingual perspective, namely within five languages: English, French, Arabic, Hebrew, and Hindi. A total of 17 teams participated in two annotation subtasks: bias (16 teams) and propaganda (6 teams). The teams competed in four evaluation tracks: guidelines development, annotation quality, annotation quantity, and consistency. Collectively, the teams produced 129,800 data points. Key findings and implications for the field are discussed.

Debiasing methods in NLP models traditionally focus on isolating information related to a sensitive attribute (e.g., gender or race). We instead argue that a favorable debiasing method should use sensitive information 'fairly,' with explanations, rather than blindly eliminating it. This fair balance is often subjective and can be challenging to achieve algorithmically. We explore two interactive setups with a frozen predictive model and show that users able to provide feedback can achieve a better and fairer balance between task performance and bias mitigation. In one setup, users, by interacting with test examples, further decreased bias in the explanations (5-8%) while maintaining the same prediction accuracy. In the other setup, human feedback was able to disentangle associated bias and predictive information from the input leading to superior bias mitigation and improved task performance (4-5%) simultaneously.

Data annotation is an important but time-consuming and costly procedure. To sort a text into two classes, the very first thing we need is a good annotation guideline, establishing what is required to qualify for each class. In the literature, the difficulties associated with an appropriate data annotation has been underestimated. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically construct an annotated sentiment corpus for Algerian dialect (a Maghrebi Arabic dialect). The construction of this corpus is based on an Algerian sentiment lexicon that is also constructed automatically. The presented work deals with the two widely used scripts on Arabic social media: Arabic and Arabizi. The proposed approach automatically constructs a sentiment corpus containing 8000 messages (where 4000 are dedicated to Arabic and 4000 to Arabizi). The achieved F1-score is up to 72% and 78% for an Arabic and Arabizi test sets, respectively. Ongoing work is aimed at integrating transliteration process for Arabizi messages to further improve the obtained results.

Quotation extraction is a widely useful task both from a sociological and from a Natural Language Processing perspective. However, very little data is available to study this task in languages other than English. In this paper, we present a manually annotated corpus of 1676 newswire texts in French for quotation extraction and source attribution. We first describe the composition of our corpus and the choices that were made in selecting the data. We then detail the annotation guidelines and annotation process, as well as a few statistics about the final corpus and the obtained balance between quote types (direct, indirect and mixed, which are particularly challenging). We end by detailing our inter-annotator agreement between the 8 annotators who worked on manual labelling, which is substantially high for such a difficult linguistic phenomenon.

We present SAINE, an Scientific Annotation and Inference ENgine based on a set of standard open-source software, such as Label Studio and MLflow. We show that our annotation engine can benefit the further development of a more accurate classification. Based on our previous work on hierarchical discipline classifications, we demonstrate its application using SAINE in understanding the space for scholarly publications. The user study of our annotation results shows that user input collected with the help of our system can help us better understand the classification process. We believe that our work will help to foster greater transparency and better understand scientific research. Our annotation and inference engine can further support the downstream meta-science projects. We welcome collaboration and feedback from the scientific community on these projects. The demonstration video can be accessed from https://youtu.be/yToO-G9YQK4. A live demo website is available at https://app.heartex.com/user/signup/?token=e2435a2f97449fa1 upon free registration.

Domain adaptive active learning is leading the charge in label-efficient training of neural networks. For semantic segmentation, state-of-the-art models jointly use two criteria of uncertainty and diversity to select training labels, combined with a pixel-wise acquisition strategy. However, we show that such methods currently suffer from a class imbalance issue which degrades their performance for larger active learning budgets. We then introduce Class Balanced Dynamic Acquisition (CBDA), a novel active learning method that mitigates this issue, especially in high-budget regimes. The more balanced labels increase minority class performance, which in turn allows the model to outperform the previous baseline by 0.6, 1.7, and 2.4 mIoU for budgets of 5%, 10%, and 20%, respectively. Additionally, the focus on minority classes leads to improvements of the minimum class performance of 0.5, 2.9, and 4.6 IoU respectively. The top-performing model even exceeds the fully supervised baseline, showing that a more balanced label than the entire ground truth can be beneficial.

In this paper we present datasets of Facebook comment threads to mainstream media posts in Slovene and English developed inside the Slovene national project FRENK which cover two topics, migrants and LGBT, and are manually annotated for different types of socially unacceptable discourse (SUD). The main advantages of these datasets compared to the existing ones are identical sampling procedures, producing comparable data across languages and an annotation schema that takes into account six types of SUD and five targets at which SUD is directed. We describe the sampling and annotation procedures, and analyze the annotation distributions and inter-annotator agreements. We consider this dataset to be an important milestone in understanding and combating SUD for both languages.

For Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, an unbalanced expert load will lead to routing collapse or increased computational overhead. Existing methods commonly employ an auxiliary loss to encourage load balance, but a large auxiliary loss will introduce non-negligible interference gradients into training and thus impair the model performance. In order to control load balance while not producing undesired gradients during training, we propose Loss-Free Balancing, featured by an auxiliary-loss-free load balancing strategy. To be specific, before the top-K routing decision, Loss-Free Balancing will first apply an expert-wise bias to the routing scores of each expert. By dynamically updating the bias of each expert according to its recent load, Loss-Free Balancing can consistently maintain a balanced distribution of expert load. In addition, since Loss-Free Balancing does not produce any interference gradients, it also elevates the upper bound of model performance gained from MoE training. We validate the performance of Loss-Free Balancing on MoE models with up to 3B parameters trained on up to 200B tokens. Experimental results show that Loss-Free Balancing achieves both better performance and better load balance compared with traditional auxiliary-loss-controlled load balancing strategies.

Deep learning has transformed AI applications but faces critical security challenges, including adversarial attacks, data poisoning, model theft, and privacy leakage. This survey examines these vulnerabilities, detailing their mechanisms and impact on model integrity and confidentiality. Practical implementations, including adversarial examples, label flipping, and backdoor attacks, are explored alongside defenses such as adversarial training, differential privacy, and federated learning, highlighting their strengths and limitations. Advanced methods like contrastive and self-supervised learning are presented for enhancing robustness. The survey concludes with future directions, emphasizing automated defenses, zero-trust architectures, and the security challenges of large AI models. A balanced approach to performance and security is essential for developing reliable deep learning systems.

Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a critical challenge in machine learning. Ensemble-based methods, like weight space ensembles that interpolate model parameters, have been shown to achieve superior OOD performance. However, the underlying mechanism for their effectiveness remains unclear. In this study, we closely examine WiSE-FT, a popular weight space ensemble method that interpolates between a pre-trained and a fine-tuned model. We observe an unexpected phenomenon, in which WiSE-FT successfully corrects many cases where each individual model makes incorrect predictions, which contributes significantly to its OOD effectiveness. To gain further insights, we conduct theoretical analysis in a multi-class setting with a large number of spurious features. Our analysis predicts the above phenomenon and it further shows that ensemble-based models reduce prediction errors in the OOD settings by utilizing a more diverse set of spurious features. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that focuses on learning invariant features for better OOD performance, our findings suggest that incorporating a large number of diverse spurious features weakens their individual contributions, leading to improved overall OOD generalization performance. Empirically we demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing diverse spurious features on a MultiColorMNIST dataset, and our experimental results are consistent with the theoretical analysis. Building upon the new theoretical insights into the efficacy of ensemble methods, we further identify an issue of WiSE-FT caused by the overconfidence of fine-tuned models in OOD situations. This overconfidence magnifies the fine-tuned model's incorrect prediction, leading to deteriorated OOD ensemble performance. To remedy this problem, we propose a novel method called BAlaNced averaGing (BANG), which significantly enhances the OOD performance of WiSE-FT.

Bias has been a constant in face recognition models. Over the years, researchers have looked at it from both the model and the data point of view. However, their approach to mitigation of data bias was limited and lacked insight on the real nature of the problem. Here, in this document, we propose to revise our use of ethnicity labels as a continuous variable instead of a discrete value per identity. We validate our formulation both experimentally and theoretically, showcasing that not all identities from one ethnicity contribute equally to the balance of the dataset; thus, having the same number of identities per ethnicity does not represent a balanced dataset. We further show that models trained on datasets balanced in the continuous space consistently outperform models trained on data balanced in the discrete space. We trained more than 65 different models, and created more than 20 subsets of the original datasets.