Learning to Complement with Multiple Humans

Abstract

Real-world image classification tasks tend to be complex, where expert labellers are sometimes unsure about the classes present in the images, leading to the issue of learning with noisy labels (LNL). The ill-posedness of the LNL task requires the adoption of strong assumptions or the use of multiple noisy labels per training image, resulting in accurate models that work well in isolation but fail to optimise human-AI collaborative classification (HAI-CC). Unlike such LNL methods, HAI-CC aims to leverage the synergies between human expertise and AI capabilities but requires clean training labels, limiting its real-world applicability. This paper addresses this gap by introducing the innovative Learning to Complement with Multiple Humans (LECOMH) approach. LECOMH is designed to learn from noisy labels without depending on clean labels, simultaneously maximising collaborative accuracy while minimising the cost of human collaboration, measured by the number of human expert annotations required per image. Additionally, new benchmarks featuring multiple noisy labels for both training and testing are proposed to evaluate HAI-CC methods. Through quantitative comparisons on these benchmarks, LECOMH consistently outperforms competitive HAI-CC approaches, human labellers, multi-rater learning, and noisy-label learning methods across various datasets, offering a promising solution for addressing real-world image classification challenges.