Probably Approximately Correct Labels

Abstract

Obtaining high-quality labeled datasets is often costly, requiring either human annotation or expensive experiments. In theory, powerful pre-trained AI models provide an opportunity to automatically label datasets and save costs. Unfortunately, these models come with no guarantees on their accuracy, making wholesale replacement of manual labeling impractical. In this work, we propose a method for leveraging pre-trained AI models to curate cost-effective and high-quality datasets. In particular, our approach results in probably approximately correct labels: with high probability, the overall labeling error is small. Our method is nonasymptotically valid under minimal assumptions on the dataset or the AI model being studied, and thus enables rigorous yet efficient dataset curation using modern AI models. We demonstrate the benefits of the methodology through text annotation with large language models, image labeling with pre-trained vision models, and protein folding analysis with AlphaFold.