HyPAC: Cost-Efficient LLMs-Human Hybrid Annotation with PAC Error Guarantees

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zeng, Hao, Huang, Huipeng, Qu, Xinhao, Huang, Jianguo, Jing, Bingyi, Wei, Hongxin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Zeng, Hao
Huang, Huipeng
Qu, Xinhao
Huang, Jianguo
Jing, Bingyi
Wei, Hongxin
author_facet Zeng, Hao
Huang, Huipeng
Qu, Xinhao
Huang, Jianguo
Jing, Bingyi
Wei, Hongxin
contents Data annotation often involves multiple sources with different cost-quality trade-offs, such as fast large language models (LLMs), slow reasoning models, and human experts. In this work, we study the problem of routing inputs to the most cost-efficient annotation source while controlling the labeling error on test instances. We propose \textbf{HyPAC}, a method that adaptively labels inputs to the most cost-efficient annotation source while providing distribution-free guarantees on annotation error. HyPAC calibrates two decision thresholds using importance sampling and upper confidence bounds, partitioning inputs into three regions based on uncertainty and routing each to the appropriate annotation source. We prove that HyPAC achieves the minimum expected cost with a probably approximately correct (PAC) guarantee on the annotation error, free of data distribution and pre-trained models. Experiments on common benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, reducing the annotation cost by 78.51\% while tightly controlling the annotation error.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02550
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HyPAC: Cost-Efficient LLMs-Human Hybrid Annotation with PAC Error Guarantees
Zeng, Hao
Huang, Huipeng
Qu, Xinhao
Huang, Jianguo
Jing, Bingyi
Wei, Hongxin
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Data annotation often involves multiple sources with different cost-quality trade-offs, such as fast large language models (LLMs), slow reasoning models, and human experts. In this work, we study the problem of routing inputs to the most cost-efficient annotation source while controlling the labeling error on test instances. We propose \textbf{HyPAC}, a method that adaptively labels inputs to the most cost-efficient annotation source while providing distribution-free guarantees on annotation error. HyPAC calibrates two decision thresholds using importance sampling and upper confidence bounds, partitioning inputs into three regions based on uncertainty and routing each to the appropriate annotation source. We prove that HyPAC achieves the minimum expected cost with a probably approximately correct (PAC) guarantee on the annotation error, free of data distribution and pre-trained models. Experiments on common benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, reducing the annotation cost by 78.51\% while tightly controlling the annotation error.
title HyPAC: Cost-Efficient LLMs-Human Hybrid Annotation with PAC Error Guarantees
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02550