What Loss Functions Do Humans Optimize When They Perform Regression and Classification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studying how humans perceive patterns in visually presented data is useful for understanding data-based decision-making and potentially understanding visually mediated sensorimotor control. We conducted experiments to examine how human subjects perform the simplest machine learning or statistical estimation tasks: linear regression and binary classification on 2D scatter plots. We used inverse optimization to infer the loss function humans optimize when they perform these tasks. Minimizing the sum of regression error raised to the power of 1.7 best-described human performing regression on sparse data. Loss functions with lower exponents, which are less sensitive to outliers, were better descriptors for regression tasks performed on less sparse data consisting of more data points. For the classification task, minimizing a logistic loss function was on average a better descriptor of human choices than an exponential loss function applied to only misclassified data. People changed their strategies as data density increased. These results represent overall trends across subjects and trials but there was large inter- and intra-subject variability in human choices. Future work may examine other loss function families and other tasks. Such understanding of human loss functions may inform the design of applications that interact with humans better and imitate humans more effectively.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
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".