Towards Scalable Oversight via Partitioned Human Supervision

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yin, Ren, Ishida, Takashi, Sugiyama, Masashi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yin, Ren
Ishida, Takashi
Sugiyama, Masashi
author_facet Yin, Ren
Ishida, Takashi
Sugiyama, Masashi
contents As artificial intelligence (AI) systems approach and surpass expert human performance across a broad range of tasks, obtaining high-quality human supervision for evaluation and training becomes increasingly challenging. Our focus is on tasks that require deep knowledge and skills of multiple domains, where this bottleneck is severe. Unfortunately, even the best human experts are knowledgeable only in a single narrow area, and will not be able to evaluate the correctness of advanced AI systems on such superhuman tasks. However, based on their narrow expertise, humans may provide a weak signal, i.e., a complementary label indicating an option that is incorrect. For example, a cardiologist could state that ''this is not related to any cardiovascular disease,'' even if they cannot identify the true disease. Based on this weak signal, we propose a scalable oversight framework that enables us to evaluate frontier AI systems without the need to prepare the ground truth. We derive an unbiased estimator of top-1 accuracy from complementary labels and quantify how many complementary labels are needed to match the variance of ordinary labels. We further introduce two estimators to combine scarce ordinary labels with abundant complementary labels. We provide finite-sample deviation guarantees for both complementary-only and the mixed estimators. Empirically, we show that we can evaluate the output of large language models without the ground truth, if we have complementary labels. We further show that we can train an AI system with such weak signals: we show how we can design an agentic AI system automatically that can improve itself with this partitioned human supervision. Our code is available at https://github.com/R-Yin-217/Towards-Scalable-Oversight-via-Partitioned-Human-Supervision.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22500
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Scalable Oversight via Partitioned Human Supervision
Yin, Ren
Ishida, Takashi
Sugiyama, Masashi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems approach and surpass expert human performance across a broad range of tasks, obtaining high-quality human supervision for evaluation and training becomes increasingly challenging. Our focus is on tasks that require deep knowledge and skills of multiple domains, where this bottleneck is severe. Unfortunately, even the best human experts are knowledgeable only in a single narrow area, and will not be able to evaluate the correctness of advanced AI systems on such superhuman tasks. However, based on their narrow expertise, humans may provide a weak signal, i.e., a complementary label indicating an option that is incorrect. For example, a cardiologist could state that ''this is not related to any cardiovascular disease,'' even if they cannot identify the true disease. Based on this weak signal, we propose a scalable oversight framework that enables us to evaluate frontier AI systems without the need to prepare the ground truth. We derive an unbiased estimator of top-1 accuracy from complementary labels and quantify how many complementary labels are needed to match the variance of ordinary labels. We further introduce two estimators to combine scarce ordinary labels with abundant complementary labels. We provide finite-sample deviation guarantees for both complementary-only and the mixed estimators. Empirically, we show that we can evaluate the output of large language models without the ground truth, if we have complementary labels. We further show that we can train an AI system with such weak signals: we show how we can design an agentic AI system automatically that can improve itself with this partitioned human supervision. Our code is available at https://github.com/R-Yin-217/Towards-Scalable-Oversight-via-Partitioned-Human-Supervision.
title Towards Scalable Oversight via Partitioned Human Supervision
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22500