Distributions In, Distributions Out: The Case for Soft-Label Training

Abstract:Supervised classifiers output a distribution over classes but are typically trained against a single label obtained by collapsing multiple annotators into a majority vote. On tasks where annotator disagreement reflects genuine ambiguity -- natural language inference, politeness, visually ambiguous categorization -- this collapse discards information and forces models to express uniform confidence on inputs where humans systematically disagree. We compare soft-label training, which uses the full annotation distribution as the target, against hard-label training across three datasets spanning vision and NLP (ChaosNLI, POPQUORN, CIFAR-10H). Soft-label training matches or exceeds hard-label accuracy on every dataset, reduces KL divergence to the annotator distribution by 32% on average (p < 10^-4), and produces predictions whose per-sample entropy correlates 61% more strongly with annotator entropy -- models trained on distributions are uncertain precisely where humans are. We argue these benefits follow from a basic observation: when annotators legitimately disagree, the annotation distribution is the correct learning target, not a noisy estimate of it.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2511.14117 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2511.14117v2 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.14117 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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