Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lan, Jian, Liu, Zhicheng, Schlegel, Udo, Zhao, Raoyuan, Liu, Yihong, Schütze, Hinrich, Hedderich, Michael A., Seidl, Thomas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11295
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918180197236736
author Lan, Jian
Liu, Zhicheng
Schlegel, Udo
Zhao, Raoyuan
Liu, Yihong
Schütze, Hinrich
Hedderich, Michael A.
Seidl, Thomas
author_facet Lan, Jian
Liu, Zhicheng
Schlegel, Udo
Zhao, Raoyuan
Liu, Yihong
Schütze, Hinrich
Hedderich, Michael A.
Seidl, Thomas
contents Large vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance in Visual Question Answering but still rely heavily on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with massive labeled datasets, which is costly due to human annotations. Crucially, real-world datasets often exhibit human uncertainty (HU) -- variation in human confidence across annotations -- but standard SFT simply optimizes toward the most frequent label, disregarding HU distributions. This leaves two open questions: How does HU affect SFT, and how can HU be effectively leveraged in training? In this work, we first conduct a systematic evaluation of VLMs across varying HU levels. We have two key findings: (i) surprisingly, high-HU samples contribute little or even degrade model performance, and (ii) naively training on the full dataset yields under-calibrated models that fail to capture HU distributions. Motivated by these findings, we introduce HaDola, a human uncertainty-aware data selection and automatic labeling framework. HaDola operates in four stages -- discriminate, self-annotate, error trigger, and training -- to iteratively identify harmful samples, prioritize informative ones, and bootstrap from a small seed set (5\% of data). Our approach substantially reduces reliance on costly HU annotations and makes VLMs more accurate and better calibrated. Extensive experiments on VQAv2 and VizWiz datasets demonstrate that HaDola consistently matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with less training data. Our work highlights the importance of explicitly modeling HU in SFT, suggesting that better utilization of HU is more effective than merely scaling up dataset size.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_11295
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Human Uncertainty-Aware Data Selection and Automatic Labeling in Visual Question Answering
Lan, Jian
Liu, Zhicheng
Schlegel, Udo
Zhao, Raoyuan
Liu, Yihong
Schütze, Hinrich
Hedderich, Michael A.
Seidl, Thomas
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance in Visual Question Answering but still rely heavily on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with massive labeled datasets, which is costly due to human annotations. Crucially, real-world datasets often exhibit human uncertainty (HU) -- variation in human confidence across annotations -- but standard SFT simply optimizes toward the most frequent label, disregarding HU distributions. This leaves two open questions: How does HU affect SFT, and how can HU be effectively leveraged in training? In this work, we first conduct a systematic evaluation of VLMs across varying HU levels. We have two key findings: (i) surprisingly, high-HU samples contribute little or even degrade model performance, and (ii) naively training on the full dataset yields under-calibrated models that fail to capture HU distributions. Motivated by these findings, we introduce HaDola, a human uncertainty-aware data selection and automatic labeling framework. HaDola operates in four stages -- discriminate, self-annotate, error trigger, and training -- to iteratively identify harmful samples, prioritize informative ones, and bootstrap from a small seed set (5\% of data). Our approach substantially reduces reliance on costly HU annotations and makes VLMs more accurate and better calibrated. Extensive experiments on VQAv2 and VizWiz datasets demonstrate that HaDola consistently matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with less training data. Our work highlights the importance of explicitly modeling HU in SFT, suggesting that better utilization of HU is more effective than merely scaling up dataset size.
title Human Uncertainty-Aware Data Selection and Automatic Labeling in Visual Question Answering
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11295