Perceptual Quality-based Model Training under Annotator Label
  Uncertainty
Chen Zhou Mohit Prabhushankar Ghassan AlRegib
Annotators exhibit disagreement during data labeling, which can be termed as
annotator label uncertainty. Annotator label uncertainty manifests in
variations of labeling quality. Training with a single low-quality annotation
per sample induces model reliability degradations. In this work, we first
examine the effects of annotator label uncertainty in terms of the model's
generalizability and prediction uncertainty. We observe that the model's
generalizability and prediction uncertainty degrade with the presence of
low-quality noisy labels. Meanwhile, our evaluation of existing uncertainty
estimation algorithms indicates their incapability in response to annotator
label uncertainty. To mitigate performance degradation, prior methods show that
training models with labels collected from multiple independent annotators can
enhance generalizability. However, they require massive annotations. Hence, we
introduce a novel perceptual quality-based model training framework to
objectively generate multiple labels for model training to enhance reliability,
while avoiding massive annotations. Specifically, we first select a subset of
samples with low perceptual quality scores ranked by statistical regularities
of visual signals. We then assign de-aggregated labels to each sample in this
subset to obtain a training set with multiple labels. Our experiments and
analysis demonstrate that training with the proposed framework alleviates the
degradation of generalizability and prediction uncertainty caused by annotator
label uncertainty.