The ALCHEmist: Automated Labeling 500x CHEaper Than LLM Data Annotators

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Tzu-Heng, Cao, Catherine, Bhargava, Vaishnavi, Sala, Frederic
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Huang, Tzu-Heng
Cao, Catherine
Bhargava, Vaishnavi
Sala, Frederic
author_facet Huang, Tzu-Heng
Cao, Catherine
Bhargava, Vaishnavi
Sala, Frederic
contents Large pretrained models can be used as annotators, helping replace or augment crowdworkers and enabling distilling generalist models into smaller specialist models. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost: employing top-of-the-line models often requires paying thousands of dollars for API calls, while the resulting datasets are static and challenging to audit. To address these challenges, we propose a simple alternative: rather than directly querying labels from pretrained models, we task models to generate programs that can produce labels. These programs can be stored and applied locally, re-used and extended, and cost orders of magnitude less. Our system, Alchemist, obtains comparable to or better performance than large language model-based annotation in a range of tasks for a fraction of the cost: on average, improvements amount to a 12.9% enhancement while the total labeling costs across all datasets are reduced by a factor of approximately 500x.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_11004
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The ALCHEmist: Automated Labeling 500x CHEaper Than LLM Data Annotators
Huang, Tzu-Heng
Cao, Catherine
Bhargava, Vaishnavi
Sala, Frederic
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Large pretrained models can be used as annotators, helping replace or augment crowdworkers and enabling distilling generalist models into smaller specialist models. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost: employing top-of-the-line models often requires paying thousands of dollars for API calls, while the resulting datasets are static and challenging to audit. To address these challenges, we propose a simple alternative: rather than directly querying labels from pretrained models, we task models to generate programs that can produce labels. These programs can be stored and applied locally, re-used and extended, and cost orders of magnitude less. Our system, Alchemist, obtains comparable to or better performance than large language model-based annotation in a range of tasks for a fraction of the cost: on average, improvements amount to a 12.9% enhancement while the total labeling costs across all datasets are reduced by a factor of approximately 500x.
title The ALCHEmist: Automated Labeling 500x CHEaper Than LLM Data Annotators
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11004