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Main Authors: Lin, Lequan, Shi, Dai, Han, Andi, Chen, Feng, Chen, Qiuzheng, Li, Jiawen, Li, Zhaoyang, Li, Jiyuan, Sun, Zhenbang, Gao, Junbin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09833
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author Lin, Lequan
Shi, Dai
Han, Andi
Chen, Feng
Chen, Qiuzheng
Li, Jiawen
Li, Zhaoyang
Li, Jiyuan
Sun, Zhenbang
Gao, Junbin
author_facet Lin, Lequan
Shi, Dai
Han, Andi
Chen, Feng
Chen, Qiuzheng
Li, Jiawen
Li, Zhaoyang
Li, Jiyuan
Sun, Zhenbang
Gao, Junbin
contents Supervised learning relies on high-quality labeled data, but obtaining such data through human annotation is both expensive and time-consuming. Recent work explores using large language models (LLMs) for annotation, but LLM-generated labels still fall short of human-level quality. To address this problem, we propose the Annotation with Critical Thinking (ACT) data pipeline, where LLMs serve not only as annotators but also as judges to critically identify potential errors. Human effort is then directed towards reviewing only the most "suspicious" cases, significantly improving the human annotation efficiency. Our major contributions are as follows: (1) ACT is applicable to a wide range of domains, including natural language processing (NLP), computer vision (CV), and multimodal understanding, by leveraging multimodal-LLMs (MLLMs). (2) Through empirical studies, we derive 7 insights on how to enhance annotation quality while efficiently reducing the human cost, and then translate these findings into user-friendly guidelines. (3) We theoretically analyze how to modify the loss function so that models trained on ACT data achieve similar performance to those trained on fully human-annotated data. Our experiments show that the performance gap can be reduced to less than 2% on most benchmark datasets while saving up to 90% of human costs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09833
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ACT as Human: Multimodal Large Language Model Data Annotation with Critical Thinking
Lin, Lequan
Shi, Dai
Han, Andi
Chen, Feng
Chen, Qiuzheng
Li, Jiawen
Li, Zhaoyang
Li, Jiyuan
Sun, Zhenbang
Gao, Junbin
Machine Learning
Supervised learning relies on high-quality labeled data, but obtaining such data through human annotation is both expensive and time-consuming. Recent work explores using large language models (LLMs) for annotation, but LLM-generated labels still fall short of human-level quality. To address this problem, we propose the Annotation with Critical Thinking (ACT) data pipeline, where LLMs serve not only as annotators but also as judges to critically identify potential errors. Human effort is then directed towards reviewing only the most "suspicious" cases, significantly improving the human annotation efficiency. Our major contributions are as follows: (1) ACT is applicable to a wide range of domains, including natural language processing (NLP), computer vision (CV), and multimodal understanding, by leveraging multimodal-LLMs (MLLMs). (2) Through empirical studies, we derive 7 insights on how to enhance annotation quality while efficiently reducing the human cost, and then translate these findings into user-friendly guidelines. (3) We theoretically analyze how to modify the loss function so that models trained on ACT data achieve similar performance to those trained on fully human-annotated data. Our experiments show that the performance gap can be reduced to less than 2% on most benchmark datasets while saving up to 90% of human costs.
title ACT as Human: Multimodal Large Language Model Data Annotation with Critical Thinking
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09833