Towards Good Practices for Efficiently Annotating Large-Scale Image Classification Datasets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Data is the engine of modern computer vision, which necessitates collecting large-scale datasets. This is expensive, and guaranteeing the quality of the labels is a major challenge. In this paper, we investigate efficient annotation strategies for collecting multi-class classification labels for a large collection of images. While methods that exploit learnt models for labeling exist, a surprisingly prevalent approach is to query humans for a fixed number of labels per datum and aggregate them, which is expensive. Building on prior work on online joint probabilistic modeling of human annotations and machine-generated beliefs, we propose modifications and best practices aimed at minimizing human labeling effort. Specifically, we make use of advances in self-supervised learning, view annotation as a semi-supervised learning problem, identify and mitigate pitfalls and ablate several key design choices to propose effective guidelines for labeling. Our analysis is done in a more realistic simulation that involves querying human labelers, which uncovers issues with evaluation using existing worker simulation methods. Simulated experiments on a 125k image subset of the ImageNet100 show that it can be annotated to 80% top-1 accuracy with 0.35 annotations per image on average, a 2.7x and 6.7x improvement over prior work and manual annotation, respectively. Project page: https://fidler-lab.github.io/efficient-annotation-cookbook
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.038 | 0.121 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".