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Poster

Soft-Label Integration for Robust Toxicity Classification

Zelei Cheng · Xian Wu · Jiahao Yu · Xin-Qiang Cai · Shuo Han · Xinyu Xing

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Fri 13 Dec 4:30 p.m. PST — 7:30 p.m. PST

Abstract:

Toxicity classification in textual content remains a significant problem. Data with labels from a single annotator fall short of capturing the diversity of human perspectives. Therefore, there is a growing need to incorporate crowdsourced annotations for training an effective toxicity classifier. Additionally, the standard approach to train a classifier with empirical risk minimization (ERM) may fail to address the potential shift between the training set and testing set due to exploiting spurious correlations. This work introduces a novel bi-level optimization framework that integrates crowdsourced annotations with the soft-labeling technique and optimizes the soft-label weights by Group Distributionally Robust Optimization (GroupDRO) to enhance the robustness against out-of-distribution (OOD) risk. We theoretically prove the convergence of our bi-level optimization algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing baseline methods in terms of both average and worst-group accuracy, confirming its effectiveness in leveraging crowdsourced annotations to achieve more effective and robust toxicity classification.

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